Listen as our speakers, sponsors, and attendees explain why open source is important to them and what brings them to Columbia, South Carolina, to be a part of POSSCON.

http://www.posscon.org/interview-videos-2012/

Stay tuned for more videos to be posted in the coming days!

Technical - Chris Aniszczyk, Open Source Manager, Twitter ( @cra - @twitter ) - Open Source and Twitter: The Technology That Powers a Tweet

Big Picture - Paula Hunter, Executive Director, Outercurve Foundation ( @huntermkt - @Outercurve ) - Starting a New Open Source Project: The Project Lifecycle and How to Be Successful

There’s no question a good project manager is key to supporting an open source project, keeping contributors in the communication loop and acting as an interface to the open source community. However, these attributes come with knowledge and experience of how to start a project, gain committer momentum and manage the project through chokepoints.

A project’s lifecycle can be very fluid, and changes to the project’s ecosystem (e.g., changes in committers) may cause unintended lulls in activity and frustrations within the community. Paula Hunter, executive director of the Outercurve Foundation, will discuss how to guide an open source project through its lifecycle, using an active OSS project as an example. Hunter will describe a set of services and activities key to ensuring a project successfully navigates the project lifecycle, and will give examples of how an OSS foundation provides support and guidance to guide a project to success.

Education - Ian Daniher, Co-Founder, Nonolith Labs ( @itdaniher - @nonolith ) - Kickstarter and Beyond – our adventures in (awesome) open, edutech

A pair of college students (Ian Daniher and Kevin Mehall, co-founders of Nonolith) set out to build an awesome tool to facilitate exploration in and out of the classroom. A successful Kickstarter project and a year later they’ve shipped hundreds of their design and learned about every step of the design and fulfillment process. This talk will share an overview of the past year and some nontechnical insights gleaned from the adventure.

Demo - Matthew Cone, Technical Writer, Linode ( @coner – @Linode ) - From Customer to Employee: My Love Affair with Linode

When Matthew Cone created a Linode account two years ago, he never expected to fall in love with the VPS hosting provider and eventually start working for the compary, but that’s exactly what happened. This talk will demonstrate why Linode is the right VPS provider for you, too. Learn how to get a VPS running in a matter of minutes, set up a NodeBalancer to distribute workload between servers, use the API to integrate Linode in to your application, and more.

Keynote Speech: Let’s Talk About Cloud – The State of the Industry

Cloud computing has brought a new flexibility and agility to IT, perfectly matched to the ambitions of open source. But proprietary protocols some cloud providers impose on APIs, for example, limit the scope of innovative applications.  The OpenStack community is pushing for a truly open cloud environment, with no vendor lock-in, so that the marriage of these two exciting developments – cloud and open source – can naturally produce a host of new applications and solutions. Join Jesse Andrews, Director of Rackspace Cloud Builders and an expert on OpenStack, for a lively discussion on the state of the cloud computing industry, how OpenStack is playing a part in driving cloud adoptions forward and the importance of cloud APIs.

What is the Cloud?

Rackspace – built on OpenStack – built on other Open Source Technologies

Pieces of Open Stack

• Compute (Nova)
• Object Storage (Swift)
• Image Service (Glance)
• Dashboard (Horizon)
• Identity (Keystone)

Try the Cloud – www.trystack.org

Develop the Cloud – Devstack

Technical - Shawn Hartsock, Speaker, Author, Open Source Contributor ( @hartsock ) - Introduction to Grails

Grails is an open source web development framework that is built on best of breed Java technologies. In order to create a highly productive environment Grails leverages the linguistic power of the Groovy Programming Language. These tools combined allow you to produce robust, powerful applications that thrive in the same places Enterprise Java does without all the weight. Learn how to leverage all the benefits of Java without paying all of the penalties. Grails is here to help.

Big Picture - Bdale Garbee, Chief Technologist for Open Source and Linux, HP, Board Member and Lead Technologist, FreedomBox ( @hp ) - FreedomBox

FreedomBox puts into people’s own hands and under their own control encrypted voice and text communication, anonymous publishing, social networking, media sharing, and (micro)blogging.  Learn more here.

Education - Carl Twarog, Professor, East Carolina University ( @EastCarolina ) - Open Source in Art

Open source software, such as Processing and hardware, such as Arduino microcontrollers, find their way into artworks large and small, professional and amateur, and into the hands of artists of all ages and levels of experience and exposure. This talk will present some of the landscape of open source projects in art and then specifically present two in depth art projects that utilize open source software and hardware.

Demo - Michael Waldrop, Director of Solutions Engineering, Alfresco ( @Alfresco ) - The Alfresco Open Source Cloud Connected Content Hub

Michael will be discussing and demonstrating how the Alfresco platform can be used to manage content on premise, in the cloud, and to mobile devices.  Alfresco provides a proven, secure, and innovative platform for managing content and creating the content centric applications that will fuel the modern mobile workforce.

Technical - Jeff Kibler, Technical Consultant and Community Liaison, Infobright ( @jrkibler – @Infobright ) - The Mystical World of Databases: Row vs. Column vs. NoSQL

Structured or unstructured? billions of new rows or billions of updates?  Sometimes it seems like you need a crystal ball to figure out which technology to use in the face of today’s exploding, fast-changing data requirements.

As big data gets bigger—especially machine-generated data—IT and business users alike are finding that traditional database analytics can’t cope with the volume, causing slow reports or the need to analyze less data at any one time.

Columnar, NoSQL and Hadoop are the hot new technologies that are helping companies manage their big data challenges. To demystify this world, join Jeff Kibler, community manager from Infobright, on the challenges posed by machine-generated data and where technologies best fit in addressing the challenges of analyzing large volumes of data.

Big Picture - W. Douglas Maughan, Ph.D., Director, Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Division, Cyber Security Division ( @DHSgov ) - Open Security: How DHS is deploying open source software to address national cyber security challenges

Cyber attacks represent one of the most serious economic and national security threats facing our nation.  The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is charged with securing federal civilian networks and safeguarding  critical infrastructure on which we all depend. The DHS Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) pursues this through the research, development, test, evaluation and transition of cyber security technologies. DHS S&T recognizes open source software is a valuable component in the comprehensive strategy to protect federal, state and local government technology systems and assets.  Dr. Douglas Maughan of the DHS S&T Cyber Security Division will discuss how open source software fits into the federal cybersecurity strategy and highlight the Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program which leverages open source programs and methodologies to support national cybersecurity objectives.

Education - Michael Weinberg, Staff Attorney, Public Knowledge ( @mweinbergPK – @publicknowledge ) - Some People Hate Fun: Protecting 3D Printing and Open Hardware in Washington, DC

3D printing is one technology that could unwittingly bring anti-user innovations like DRM into the physical world.  In the name of fighting “physical goods piracy,” disrupted industries may call on Congress to pass laws mandating certain limiting features be include in new 3D printers.  This talk will discuss some of the intellectual property ramifications of widespread 3D printing, and outline some of the work being done to build allies among policymakers before problems arise.  The talk will also include a more general discussion about how the larger Open community can work towards the same goals.

Demo - John Mertic, Community Manager, SugarCRM ( @jmertic – @SugarCRM ) - Building an application on the SugarCRM platform

Need to build an application to run part of your organization? One approach is that you could start writing something from scratch, perhaps leveraging an existing general purpose framework to help get you going. However, even if you use a framework, there’s still the need to build all those standard components such as user interface, workflow, and ACL security, which can take quite some time to design and code.

There’s no need to start from scratch; SugarCRM is designed as a Rapid Application Development platform. In this session you’ll learn the basics on how to build a business application on the Open Source SugarCRM platform.

Keynote Speech: Who’s Leading Now

Scott McNealy co-founded Sun Microsystems, Inc. in 1982, serving as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Sun’s Board of Directors for 22 years. During his tenure at Sun McNealy drove the company’s innovation in open, network computing, and he helped transform Sun from a Silicon Valley start-up to a leading provider of network computing infrastructure with more than 30,000 employees worldwide. In 1986, he took the company public, creating one of the most notable publicly traded technology companies, all while positioning Sun as the model of corporate integrity.

McNealy’s vision and business acumen have made him one of the most influential and widely quoted leaders in the complex and fast-moving IT industry. He helped to evolve the industry through his vision of network computing with the phrase, “The Network is the Computer.” This vision has guided the direction of technology innovation into the 21st century and is today referred to as “cloud computing”.

McNealy recently announced his next innovative venture, launching Wayin in October, 2011. Wayin is a unique mobile engagement service connecting users and enterprise partners anywhere, anytime. McNealy serves as the Chairman and lead investor in Wayin, which offers a fun, entertaining way for both users and enterprise partners to post photos, ask questions, play live games, share results, and spark conversation amongst friends, consumers and people worldwide with similar interests.

McNealy continues to be recognized for his longstanding commitment to education and advocacy for open and competitive business practices. In March 2004, he led Sun to create the Global Education & Learning Community (GELC) to leverage open source to provide affordable lifelong learning for all students, no matter where they live.

GELC was spun off in 2006 as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit now called Curriki. The organization’s name is a play on the combination of “curriculum” and “wiki”. Curriki is built on the XWiki platform, an open source development platform and “Next Generation Wiki” application developed in Java and released the LGPL open source license.

Curriki’s mission is to eliminate the Education Divide – the gap between those who have access to high- quality education and those who do not – in the U.S. and worldwide. Its online community of educators, learners and committed education experts works together to create quality materials that benefit teachers, parents and students globally. Currently, the site offers more than 44,000 free curriculum resources, engages more than 214,000 members, and receives over two million unique visits per year from educators and students from every country in the world.

Accessing the Wayin service through a smart device or online, people can participate and interact with each other as they experience live events, such as sports, television shows, concerts and political debates. Wayin is partnering with leading organizations across multiple sectors, including the Los Angeles Kings, Playboy Enterprises and the Republican National Committee. The Wayin service is available as a free download on iPhone and Android mobile devices, as well as at wayin.com and on Facebook and Twitter.

As a member of Curriki’s Board of Directors and the visionary behind the idea for Curriki, McNealy will help guide the organization’s goal of making high-quality curricula universally accessible. He is always fighting for openness and choice: “Without choice, you have no innovation. Without innovation, you have nothing.”

McNealy earned a Bachelors of Arts from Harvard University in 1976 and received a Masters of Business Administration from Stanford University in 1980. He is a former hockey player and is a single- digit handicap golfer. He is married and is the father of four boys.

And now the speech:

Open Source People – you are a Technology Army!

Scott lasted 2 days when Oracle bought Sun – he blames it on a “paperwork snafu” … haha

Who’s Leading Now?

Scott prefaced this by reminding us that he no longer “has a dog in the fight” – but that some things and ways of thinking die hard for him.

Top 10 Signs you company should have gone OSS

1. Chapter 11 is cheaper than switching ERP vendors
2. Ballmer just joined your BOD
3. Your CIO and IBM CEO are on a billboard in Times Square
4. More of you employees attended Oracle Open Word than your all-hands meeting
5. A SW vendor audit is worse than an IRS audit
6. SW support pricing growing faster than a Pelosi budget deficit
7. You actually believe IBM will release DB 3 for the mainframe
8. Your Oracle rep laughs when you schedule a contract negotiation meeting
9. Compared to Apple, you now think Microsoft is open
10. Your ELA cost just surpassed your corporate income tax payments and the Obama vacation budget combined

The reason Sun went to OS, was because they were the underdog – they had to compete with MS, and had to find ways around them.

Part of what it meant for the industry: Half a billion to a billion dollars in margin per month taken away from MS Office from the downloads of OpenOffice.

Every company should decide what their OS strategy is – is your corporate legal department letting you come here to an Open Source conference today, or using it in the first place.

A couple of things about Open Source Software (OSS)

OSS is safer than proprietary code – everyone can see the code, so the bugs will be figured out by others, for you, before you go to production.

OSS is higher quality code – the engineers don’t want to be embarrassed. It’s like running around naked or bikini season, everyone can see.

ZBT Entry – Zero Barrier to Entry

ZBT Exit – Zero Barrier to Exit too – the cost of exit should be in the purchase price (for proprietary software)

Java Community Process – Hybrid model = Benevolent Dictator model (or Benevolent Steward) (it works – embrace it)! – Hundreds of competitors developing for you, opened it, and licensed it back to everyone.

Who is going to lead the OSS movement now?

The technological, spiritual and financial leader (Sun) of OSS is gone.

Technical - Chris Hinkley, Senior Security Engineer, FireHost ( @firehost ) - Secure Cloud Hosting: Real requirements to protect your open source data

Go ahead. Do a Google Trend analysis of the phrases “cloud hosting” and “cloud security.” You’ll find that it was only five short months after Amazon introduced the idea of the cloud in 2008 that businesses realized that it wasn’t secure and started searching for answers. Since then, the promise of the cloud has continued to grow, as has the need to secure the data stored in it, particularly for open source environments. Just because data is kept in the cloud doesn’t mean it’s stored in an idealized floating bubble. Data is still on a server in a server room somewhere, meaning that breaches, hackers and all sorts of trouble can still access it.

In addition, other challenges plague the idea of cloud hosting. Network availability is a must for high traffic sites, but many bump into issues that halt their performance thanks to network bottlenecks and complexity in the security framework. Also, businesses that used to accept flat charges for hosting now want to see what’s in the black box. Transparency has become incredibly important to businesses that know their usage fluctuates and want to pay for only what they use on a daily or monthly basis. These same businesses understand that their site traffic varies depending on their marketing initiatives, causing them to demand scalability to match these programs. Why pay for more than you’re using? And shouldn’t your host be able to give you more when you need it?

Attendees of this session will:

• Learn why secure hosting is more important than ever for open source, as supported by customer case studies
• Hear actual case histories of how performance issues have crippled businesses, as well as what types of businesses are gearing up to really test hosting providers on the performance front
• Understand what transparency truly looks like and what kinds of things to look for under the hood when seeking a hosting provider
• Get a sneak peek into the future of the hosting world, including topics such as follow-the-sun and globalized hosting credentials

Big Picture - Jonathan LeBlanc, Technology Evangelist, PayPal ( @jcleblanc  - @paypalx )  - Changing the Face of Open Identity in Ecommerce

The case for online identity has been present for as long as there has been a need to customize a web experience for an individual person. From OpenID to Mozilla’s new BrowserID, there are open solutions for solving the issue of having different logins for all of the sites and services we use.

The problem with open identity systems in the Ecommerce world is not that they don’t allow us to use a single login everywhere, but in the fact that the identifying characteristics of a user using current implementations of these systems is so shallow, providing basically a “yes, this person has an account” answer to “who is this user?”.

While extensive identity information may not be an issue when dealing with social media accounts that don’t tie in payment systems, when it comes to the processing of goods and user bank accounts, the more details about a person that you can have the easier, and safer, your transactions will be.

This is where new X.commerce identity is trying to change the world of open identity. By leveraging off of the massive user Ecommerce information of PayPal and eBay, as well as all user data and security extensions that OpenID has to offer, open Ecommerce identity is now a valuable source of real user data.

What’s unique about having a PayPal backed identity solution is that our users tie in real banking account information to their profiles and large portions of their real identity. Using buying and selling history, user ratings, profile identifiers and a vast array of different user data, X.commerce identity is able to define “trust levels” for a user who signs in to your site.

Taking this a step further, having payment and identity tied together means that you can skip steps in the checkout process, decreasing user drop-off by being able to skip the login stage, prefilling shipping and receiving information, user details, and much more.

At the end of the day, we are trying to provide an answer to the question, “How can we provide a real identity solution for merchants and buyers to make purchasing easier and safer?”

Education - Arnie Murdock, Director, Office of Extended Studies, South Carolina State University ( @scstate1896 ) - World-Class eLearning with Moodle

The Moodle Learning Management System is gaining acceptance as a safe and powerful eLearning platform of choice for both corporate and educational institutions.  This talk will provide both an overview of Moodle’s features and capabilities as well as an overview of common issues associated with administering and securing a Moodle site. Topics will include:

• Anatomy of a Moodle Course
• Overview of the Moodle System
• Installation and System Requirements
• User, Course, and Enrollment Management
• Overview of Configuration Options and Issues
• System Maintenance
• Security and Hosting Related Issues
• Enhancing Moodle

Demo - Peter Zaitsev, Founder and CEO, Percona ( @peterzaitsev ) - The Percona Suite of Open Source MySQL Products & Services

Percona develops Open Source Software products which help businesses run MySQL more successfully. In this presentation we will talk about:

• Percona Server – the enhanced MySQL alternative developed for demanding MySQL usage scenarios which provides increased performance and manageability
• Percona Toolkit – a set of tools for a variety of common administration tasks which make MySQL DBAs more successful
• Percona XtraBackup – the open source backup alternative which provides secure and non-intrusive backups
• Percona Monitoring Plugins – plugins for connecting to other OSS solutions in order to provide insightful trending and actionable alerting for MySQL infrastructure
• Percona XtraDB Cluster – our beta release open source solution for MySQL Clustering

If you use MySQL, this session will point you to new OSS solutions and approaches which will enable you to be more successful now and in the future.

Technical - Dave Abrahams, Founding Member, Boost.org, Principal, Boost Consulting ( @daveabrahams ) - Introducing C++11

Introducing C++11: For the first time since 1998, we have a new C++ standard. Though a few of the features have been available as extensions for years, some are brand new, and we’re only just learning what it’s like to program in this new C++ language. In this talk, I’ll give an overview of the most important new developments and dip into one of the flagship features, move semantics.

Big Picture - David Nalley, Community Manager, CloudStack (@ke4qqq – @cloudstack )  - How to Succeed with the Cloud

Cloud, and specifically open source cloud is the buzzword of the past couple of years, everyone is talking about it, everyone wants it, but few grasp the concepts, and even fewer are successful with it. We’ll focus on Infrastructure as a Service (aka Compute Clouds) and Platform as a Service (aka Developer Clouds), discussing what they are, why they are important, and what you need to be successful with them. Attendees will walk away with a very clear understanding of what cloud computing is – what the use cases are for cloud computing, the business benefits, how to be successful with cloud computing, as well as the current state of the open source cloud computing field.

Education - Lindsay Levkoff, Ph.D., Director of Education, SparkFun Electronics  ( @neurdy – @sparkfun ) - Improving the Adoption of Open Source Technology in the Classroom

The altruism, passion and strengths of the open source community is gaining ground in the education community. What have we learned from our experience thus far and how do we improve the adoption of open source technology in the classroom? A discussion of what the Department of Education at SparkFun Electronics learned during its first year with early adopters, students, parents, educators and administrations, and how we plan to increase the affordability and accessibility of technology for all students.

Demo - Ben Bleikamp, Designer, GitHub ( @bleikamp – @github ) - How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub

GitHub has no managers, dozens of remote employees, and no set hours to be in an office. This talk will cover how we use GitHub, a robot, and a few other tools to work asynchronously and ship new features and products to users every day.

Technical - Tobin Bradley, Strategic Planner, Mecklenburg County, NC( @fuzzytolerance – @CharlotteNCgov ) - How Open Source permeates every aspect of geospatial operations at Mecklenburg County (Charlotte, NC)

Open source software permeates every aspect of our geospatial operations at Mecklenburg County. From desktop and web clients to mission critical spatial databases and service oriented architecture, open source software has allowed Mecklenburg County to achieve world-class results, maximize our flexibility and agility, and ensure taxpayers see a maximum return on investment. This talk will discuss open source GIS solutions, Mecklenburg County’s history with open source software, and how sharing code with the community is a great way to foster collaboration and innovation.

Big Picture - Jim Jagielski, President, Apache Software Foundation, Sr. Consulting Software Engineer, Red Hat Inc. ( @jimjag – @theASF ) - Open Source: Licenses and Communities

Despite claims to the contrary, in the Open Source world, there is no true single license and no true single community. Instead, there is a small subset of both license and community types that pretty much all open source projects are based on, depending on the needs and wants of both the developer and the end-user ecosystem.

Jim will distill down the various licenses and communities down to their core components, explain the differences between them, describe their plusses and minuses, and help figure out which license and community type is most appropriate for you and your code.

Education - Carol Smith, Program Manager, Google – ( @Fossygirl – @google ) - Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in

Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in are two sister programs that aim at getting students involved in open source software. Google Code-in is aimed at 13-17 year olds, and Google Summer of Code is aimed at university students. I’ll be discussing both programs and the impact they’ve had on students and FOSS communities the world over.

Demo - Jorge Castro, Cloud Community Liaison, Canonical – ( @castrojo - @cononical  ) - Juju – Devops Distilled

Juju is a service orchestration tool for deploying to the cloud. Through the use of charms, juju provides you with shareable, re-usable, and repeatable expressions of DevOps best practices. You can use them unmodified, or easily change and connect them to fit your needs. Deploying a charm is similar to installing a package on Ubuntu: ask for it and it’s there, remove it and it’s completely gone. This talk will cover why we think there’s a need for this tool for the cloud, and how we can help Devops manage services throughout its lifetime, not just during deployment.

Keynote Speech: Big Data, Hadoop and Open Source

Stephen A. Brodsky, Ph.D., is a Technical Executive and Distinguished Engineer for IBM Big Data initiatives at the IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory. Big Data is the strategic integration of large scale information processing, including Hadoop map-reduce, streams, database, web servers, indexing, analytics, ETL, modeling, and traceability for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. Previously he led the architecture for the Optim Data Studio product line and pureQuery and was a member of the architecture team for DB2 pureXML, Rational Application Developer (RAD), and WebSphere.

Dr. Brodsky holds doctoral and master’s degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a joint bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Biochemistry and Cell Biology. He has filed over 40 patent applications.

With an explosion of data – every day, we need to decide what to do – ready or not. There is so much information out there that could be used, but most companies can’t capture it and organize it quickly enough to use it effectively.

Big Data represents a huge opportunity for new insight.

We can look at

• Volume
• Velocity
• Variety

IBM Watson (along with Jeopardy) demonstrated the power of Big Data analytics – Can we design a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language, interpreting meaning and context and retrieving, analyzing and understanding vast amounts of information in real-time.

Watson used the Apache Hadoop open framework to distribute the workload for loading information in to memory. Watson can consume insights form Big Data for advanced analysis. Basically it took real-time questions and answered them in real-time using Big Data.

IBM Big Data Text Analytics – finds structure from unstructured data / analytics. Reading language, especially in Social Networks – you can find Names , Locations, Spam, and down to Monetizable Situations with peoples Tweets and Facebook Posts.

This is allowing us to Monetize Relationships, not just Transactions – taking small information needles, and bringing them together to understand individual customers – montetizing on their social network / shopping decisions.

You can extend this into the healthcare field – like with premature babies – analyzing thousands of pieces of sensor information per second – process them in parallel - and run them against know factors to help prevent infection for the babies – signals the onset of infection in the first sign, up to 24 hours in advance, to notify healthcare professionals to react sooner.

Why didn’t we use all of the Big Data before?

We didn’t know if the “gold” was there – so we keep looking for high quality “viens” of data to see what is really “gold”. Think back to the early days of Google and before with search engine data – what’s actually relevant? This is leading to Massive Scale Analytics – and how to process those analytics.

This leads to the Big Data Open Source Ecosystem: e.g., Runtime systems: Apache.org / Development Environments: Eclipse.org & Jazz.net – with several emerging, like: Hadoop, Hive, Pig, ZooKeeper, IDE, Jetty, and of course HTTP.

IBM has been, and is extremely active in helping to develop pieces of the Open Source Ecosystem – and bringing a Big Data Platform to directly, and help other partner companies manage and interpret Big Data.