Thinking about programming in new ways
IBM is the first out of the starting gate. They have certifies Unbunu Linux for use with DB2. This just validates my view that there is a compelling case for Ubuntu Linux in mainstream businesses.
Does this mean they Ubuntu will have to change it’s slogan to “Linux for Human Beings (and Large Multi-National Corporations)?
OK, so I just got out of a BOF session with Mark Shuttleworth and the LTSP guys. And there was a lot of good information in there, which is definitely worth sharing.
To start the session, Mark talked a bit about why he got interested in working with the LTSP guys, and why he thinks LTSP is important. The whole thing started as they thought about what is happening in the open source world that is unique and special, and one of the first things that came to mind was LTSP. Not only that, but it was important to one of Mark’s other projects which had to do with providing a cost effective way to supply computing infrastructure to Schools in South Africa.
Mark went on to say; “I think LTSP is a good solution for a whole host of problems, but it is starting where infrastructure and support costs are critical.” It seems that for Mark getting into the cost-critical sections of the market will provide great stories that drive the technology into other more change averse market segments.
Another critical piece for Mark is his agenda to unify the user experience across various technologies. “It works the same when it boots from USB, or from the Live CD, or from the hard drive, or from the network.” If we are going to see open source take off on the desktop users have to believe that they know what is going to happen, and that the same thing is going to happen every time; “Predictability and reliability are key.”
The Ubuntu team worked hard to make sure LTSP works with the same bits as the live CD, witch works with the same bits as the hard drive install, and that works the same as if you had booted off of a USB key or USB hard drive. They also worked hard to put out a proof of concept release edubuntu, which is great, but now the focus has to shift into making this easy to customize for individual educational needs.
I think Mark is exactly right on all of these points, and that the integration of LTSP into has produced something that is easier to manage, and it is only going to get cleaner and better over the coming year.
Matt Zimmerman, Oliver Grawert, and others have put a lot of work into integrating LTSP into Ubuntu, and creating a new flavor of Ubuntu called edubuntu. And this week Jim McQuillan, Oliver, and a bunch of other folks have cut the boot time of a Ubuntu LTSP in half, and come up with a bunch of other improvements.
And today the LTSP conference is officially getting started. Already even before the conference got started officially, there has been lots of cool stuff going on with local sound, support for local USB devices, an easy to use gui based network PXE boot manager, etc.
Jim says “By this time next year, Ubuntu will have touched more people with LTSP than we have up to this point.” So it looks like 2006 will be an even bigger year for LTSP than 2005 — and 2005 was a great year, with first ever distro integration, best in show at Linux World, and a lot of cool stuff.
OK, so this is the blog entry that I have been trying to write all week.
Over at Toyota and Honda they design cars with an interesting model which I’ll call the “Lean Product Development” model. This is model is very different from the traditional processed used in product design, and the studies show that Lean Product Development is significantly more productive that the traditional processes. In other words Toyota and Honda can design more cars with better quality per year than their traditional counterparts, and they do it with significantly smaller design teams.
But, what the heck does this have to do with Open Source development? Well, in several important ways the open source development methodology mirrors the Lean Product Development methodology. This relationship is a huge topic, and one I can’t claim to have understood fully or to be able to cover completely today.
So for today, I’ll focus on the idea of Set Based Development. Toyota designs some specifications for interfaces between components, and then they design multiple engines, multiple transmissions, multiple alternators, etc concurrently. Then they document the various trade-offs for each of the components, and they bring them together in a series of integration events, where they refine the interfaces, and eventually select the best engine from the pool for this particular model.
This has several advantages, Toyota can work on a revolutionary hybrid engine, with almost no risk, because should the hybrid engine not work or fail to meet the design goals of the car, there is always another choice.
So, this morning Martin Pool showed of bazaar-ng, which is important because it is an example of open source set based development, and because it is an great tool for doing set based development. About a year ago, Canonical decided that they would like to have better tools for distributed revision control. They then started two projects bazaar and bazaar-ng. Bazaar was a conservative project based on incementally improving the best available tool, and Bazaar-NG was research project to see what revolutionary improvements were possible.
This is what Ubuntu Linux does all day do all the time, they have various pre-release events, where all the various packages which might be in the distribution, and if some new package isn’t cutting it they can roll back to something more stable.
For example, it turns out Bazaar-NG is now faster than Bazaar, has a better interface, is easier to extend, and is generally better. So after a lot of testing, Canonical is switching entirely over to Bazaar-NG.
I’ll write more later about why bazaar, and distributed version control, is such an important for set based development.
Before NT 4 came out Microsoft was non-existent in the server market, then by the time Windows 2000 Server came out Microsoft was one of the largest players in the same market. We also know that NT 4 Server was unstable crap, so what happened? How did Microsoft make a huge dent in the server market with such a troubled product?
The most important of which is the fact that Microsoft already owned most of the desktop market. At the most basic level people would much rather not have to support two different operating systems.
This is something that is already happening in the Ubuntu world, just this morning I talked to someone who moved all his Red Hat and Debian servers to Ubuntu. He started with Ubuntu on his desktop, and loved it, and decided that it would be easier not to have to deal with all those differences.
Beyond that Microsoft made it pretty easy to integrate their desktop with their server. And sometimes they did some crazy possibly illegal stuff to make sure other server systems wouldn’t work as well with their desktops. This only worked because they had a monopoly on the desktop, and it was only possible because they weren’t particularly interested in taking the moral high ground.
Of course Ubuntu has neither the monopoly or the slippery moral stance of Microsoft. So, Ubuntu is taking the exact opposite approach on this front, the server should just work, and it should just work with as many client OS’s as possible.