SVLUG Meeting History

AMANDA is a popular open-source backup and archiving package. AMANDA uses native tools, and can back up a large number of machines running various versions of the Linux, Unix, or Microsoft Windows operating systems. This talk will discuss the state of AMANDA, and also new project developments. For more information, please see http://wiki.zmanda.com/.

Paddy Sreenivasan is a core AMANDA developer, working at Zmanda, Inc.

This presentation introduces XML11, an abstract windowing protocol inspired by the X11-protocol develop by MIT. XML11 is an XML-based protocol that allows asynchronous UI updates of widgets to an end-device. To overcome high-latency connections, XML11 allows migration of application logic to the end-device. The prototype implementation of XML11 runs in any standard Web browser without Java capabilities on the client-side, and replaces AWT/Swing on the server-side. This also allows us to expose legacy AWT/Swing applications as Web applications.

Ultimately, XML11 can be used for writing AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications without requiring any JavaScript knowledge. The prototype implementation of XML11 is released under the GPL and available at www.xml11.org.

Arno Puder received his masters and Ph.D. in computer science, and is currently working as an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University. He is one of the founders of the MICO CORBA implementation. His special interests include distributed systems, middleware architectures, and ubiquitous computing environments.

JXTA technology is a set of open protocols allowing any connected device on a network, ranging from cell phones and wireless PDAs to PCs and servers, to communicate and collaborate in a P2P manner. JXTA peers create a virtual network where any peer can interact with other peers and resources directly, even when some of the peers and resources are behind firewalls and NATs, or are on different network transports.

Henry Jen is a Sun Microsystems engineer working on the JXTA project.

This month, we'll have multiple short presentations by SVLUG members about projects they use or are involved in.

• Micah Dowty will be presenting "CIA: A real-time window into the open source world".
• Bill Kendrick will be presenting the "State of Tuxpaint".
• Andrew Chant will be presenting "SSH/SSL/GPG/DES/RSA/AES/WTF? Demystifying commonly used security protocols and encryption", and hold a PGP/gnupg key signing at the end. (Important: Participants should read keysigning procedures in advance.)

The Sync4j Project is an open source initiative to deliver a complete mobile application platform implementing the SyncML protocol. SyncML defines a standard way to synchronize data and remotely manage devices. Sync4j has more then 10,000 downloads per month (as of March 2005).

Fabrizio Capobianco is CEO of Funambol, the company behind Sync4j. Prior to getting involved in open source, he founded two startups (the first Web company in Italy, back in 1995). At the end of 1999, Fabrizio moved to Silicon Valley, where he started working for Tibco Finance, as Director of Brokerage Systems. Since 2000, Fabrizio has had a monthly column in the magazine Wireless. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Splunk, based in San Francisco, makes a Web-based AJAX-enhanced search engine that allows system administrators and programmers to search all their incoming log files in real time (any type of log files: Sendmail, Cisco, MySQL, syslog, etc.) with a Google-like interface. It's a powerful tool to allow people to 'see' inside their systems as they are running.

Prior to joining Splunk, Patrick McGovern managed SourceForge.net for five years for VA Software / OSTG.

Kyle Rankin of NBLUG is author of Knoppix Hacks for O'Reilly and Associates. As such, he's eminently qualified to give a technical talk for SVLUG about this wildly popular live CD distribution, and its use to troubleshoot, repair, upgrade, disinfect, and generally be productive without relying on the installed system or overwriting that system with Linux itself.

Galago is a desktop presence framework, designed to transmit presence information between programs. To put it in simpler terms, it takes information on who is online and their away/idle states from an instant messenger (such as gaim) or other similar programs and lets other programs (such as Ximian's Evolution) to make use of it.

The advantage of such a framework is that it brings your programs closer together. When you receive an e-mail from a friend who is in your buddy list, you'll be able to immediately tell their online status, for example.

Galago is desktop-neutral, and will in time provide easy to use widgets for Gtk+ and Qt applications. Currently, Gtk+ widgets are available in our Subversion repository under the module name libgalago-gtk. Qt widgets will be available in time.

Federated Identity Management allows individuals to use the same identification to sign on to the networks of more than one enterprise, in order to conduct transactions.

Partners in such a system depend on each other to authenticate and vouch for their users, without needing to adopt the same tools for directory services, security, and authentication.

The Liberty Alliance Project (http://www.projectliberty.org/ ) is the only open body working to address the technical, business, and policy challenges surrounding identity and Web services. The Alliance is made up of over 150 members representing a variety of industries from around the world, maintains an open membership policy, and collaborates with other standards bodies.

LAP's specifications for FIM and Web services are built on open protcols, and are device and platform agnostic.

Atul Tulshibagwale is co-founder and CEO of Trustgenix, Inc., a leading provider of standards-based Federated Identity Management software. Mr. Tulshibagwale is a recognized industry expert on secure Web payment, authentication, and privacy technologies for wired and wireless networks. Prior to founding Trustgenix, Mr. Tulshibagwale was a technology leader for five years at VeriSign, where he developed several digital identity and payment products, including Qualcomm BREW "3G Code Signing" Services, GoSecure! for Microsoft Exchange; the Personal Trust Agent; and Personal Trust Service. Previously, Mr. Tulshibagwale was co-founder of Entevo, an Internet security software firm that was acquired by BindView Corporation. He was also a supercomputing expert at the Indian Center for the Development of Advanced Computing. He holds an M.Tech in Computer Science from University of Pune, India.

Mr. Weinberg provided an introduction to the Open Source Development Lab, its initiatives (Carrier Grade Linux, Data Center Linux, and Desktop Linux), an update on how Linux is doing in the marketplace, and insight into the Linux kernel development process. He closed with a call to action — how SVLUG can members work with the OSDL and participate in their initiatives and lab activities — and has kindly provided SVLUG with a copy of his lecture slides.

Bill Weinberg brings over 18 years of open systems, embedded, and other IT experience to his role as Open Source Architecture Specialist and Linux Evangelist at the Open Source Development Labs, where he participates in OSDL initiatives for Carrier-Grade, Data Center, and Desktop Linux.

Prior to OSDL, Bill was a founding team-member at MontaVista Software, and helped establish Linux as a favored platform for next-generation intelligent device development. In his extensive and varied career, Bill also worked at Lynx Real-Time Systems, Acer Computer, and Microtec Research.

Today Bill is known for his writing and speaking on topics that include Open Source licensing, international adoption of Linux, embedded/real-time computing, application porting/migration, and Linux-based consumer electronics and handheld applications. He is a regular contributor periodicals such as E.E. Times, Applied Computing, LinuxUser, Elektronik, and Embedded Systems Europe, and has been a featured speaker at Intel Developer Forum, ESC, and LinuxWorld.

OSDL — home to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux — is dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Founded in 2000 and supported by a global consortium of IT industry leaders, OSDL is a non-profit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and test facilities in the United States and Japan available to developers around the world.

OSDL's founding members are IBM, HP, CA, Intel, and NEC. It's currently made up of 75 members from more than 10 computing industry segments.

The Linux Terminal Server Project is an add-on package for Linux allowing numerous low-powered "thin client" terminals to connect to a Linux server. Applications then run on the server, while accepting input and displaying output on the thin clients. An office or computer lab can be constructed using one powerful server and many inexpensive thin clients — old PCs, for example. Configuration and upgrades are then centralized at the server, rather than distributed to numerous expensive desktops.

K12LTSP, a popular solution for schools with limited budgets, is a distribution of Linux based on Red Hat Fedora and the LTSP packages. Steve Hargadon recently completed an installation of K12LTSP at a charter school in Hawaii, and is currently working with the Canadian government to install thin client labs in 2,000 schools in Kenya, Africa.

Steve Hargadon has recently completed installations of K12LTSP in schools in Hawaii, California, Utah, and Illinois. He is currently working with the Canadian government to install thin client labs in 2,000 schools in Kenya, Africa. His company, Hargadon Computer, Inc.,* also sells K12LTSP pre-installed servers and refurbished (recycled) workstations at www.technologyrescue.com.

Donald Becker, Chief Scientist of Scyld Software and CTO of Penguin Computing, has consistently challenged conventional wisdom — from the early days of his Beowulf Project at NASA through to the creation of Scyld as a commercial entity and the introduction of the Scyld Beowulf distribution. By upsetting expected beliefs, Donald has maintained a continuum of innovation in the Linux arena that continues to address unmet needs today. Ten years ago, it was widely believed that only custom--esigned vector architectures could solve supercomputing problems.... Along came Beowulf, which solved such problems using a connected cluster of commodity systems, based on Linux — at a time when many who had not explored Linux either ignored it or grouped it with other "toy" systems. In fact, at the first cluster systems conference in 1997, the widely held belief was that Microsoft held the future of all software in its hands. Fast forward to 2000, when Scyld introduced a prototype of a Unified Cluster System, which completely changed the approach to building clusters by using a full installation only on a master node, with compute nodes running only applications. Donald's talk will look back on this history of challenging conventional wisdom, and how it has contributed to the startling growth in Linux clustering; and he'll also offer a glimpse of a future where, he believes, clustering will be the natural evolution of the computing ecosystem.

Donald is an internationally recognized operating system developer, and the original inventor of Beowulf. In 1999, he founded Scyld Computing and led the development of the next-generation Beowulf cluster operating system, which is the cornerstone for commodity-based high-performance cluster computing. Prior to founding Scyld, Don started the Beowulf Parallel Workstation project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Don's work in parallel and distributed computing began in 1983 at MIT's Real Time Systems group. He is known throughout the international community of operating system developers for his contributions to networking software, and as the driving force behind beowulf.org. He is the co-author of How to Build a Beowulf: A Guide to the Implementation and Application of PC Clusters. With colleagues from the California Institute of Technology and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he was the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society 1997 Gordon Bell Prize for Price/Performance. Don holds a B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scalix produces a Linux e-mail server that supports shared scheduling and advanced e-mail features, delivering desktop-grade productivity to users running Outlook and/or popular browsers such as Mozilla, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Scalix's messaging server can run side by side with both mainstream proprietary systems, such as Microsoft Exchange, and open source applications, bridging the two worlds and integrating with a company's existing IT infrastructure.

Steve Martensen is Senior Messaging Specialist at Scalix. He has been in the messaging industry since 1991, first working for Lotus Development on cc:Mail, then on to Lotus Notes, then focusing for several years on messaging migration, and now at Scalix for the past two years. He wrote and developed the Exchange to Scalix migration process.

GOSSiP (Gossip Optimization for Selective Spam Prevention) is a distributed, peer-to-peer reputation management system. It tracks the behavior of e-mail senders, and shares senders' reputations among participating mail servers. These reputations may then be used by mail servers as part of a comprehensive program to combat unwanted e-mail.

Mark C. Langston has been doing systems administration for more than 10 years. In that time, he has worked for small groups and huge companies. He has worked in academia and industry, for startups and long-established companies, and for salaries ranging from below-subsistence to obscene in size. He's worked his way from the most junior of technical employees to Chief Technical Officer and corporate board member. He is on the advisory committee for the Linux Professional Institute certification, and is an active member of SAGE and USENIX.

Dror Harel came to Qlusters with over 14 years of experience in managing the development of innovative software products. Before joining Qlusters, Dror held a senior product management position at Sanctum, Inc., where he drove development of the company's security software products. Previously, Dror had been Vice-President of Quality and Product Integration, and Vice-President of Product Management at Veon, where he oversaw the development of Web authoring and interactive multimedia products. When Veon was purchased by Philips (Royal Philips Electronics) in 2001, Dror assumed a senior position on their audio/video streaming product management team.

Prior to his civilian experience, Dror served eleven years in the Israeli defense force, eight of them as Commander of an elite R&D unit.

Harel holds a Computer Science and Economics degree from Tel Aviv University.

Valerie will give a review of UNIX file systems, focussing on Linux file systems, the evolution of file system design, and various approaches to solving the problems of performance, consistency, and recovery.

Valerie will also briefly discuss LinuxChix, a community for women in Linux. The membership ranges from novices to experienced users, and includes programmers, system administrators, technical writers and people who just like Linux.

Valerie Henson works at IBM as a Linux kernel developer, and has served on program committees for FREENIX, the USENIX Technical Conference and Ottawa Linux Symposium. Most recently she worked on ZFS, a new file system for Solaris. Valerie became interested in women in computing after wondering where all the other female Linux kernel developers were.

John Ousterhout is Founder and CEO of Electric Cloud. He is the creator of the Tcl scripting language, and is also well known for his work in distributed operating systems, high-performance file systems, and user interfaces. Ousterhout's prior positions include Founder and CEO of Scriptics Corporation (acquired by Interwoven), Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and Professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley. He received a BS degree in Physics from Yale University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Ousterhout is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has received numerous awards, including the ACM Software System Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.

Golden is a frequent speaker and writer on Information Technology topics, and has contributed to or been featured in major industry publications such as InfoWorld, eWeek, LinuxWorld, SDTimes, Computerworld, O'Reilly LAMP, Open Enterprise Trends, Enterprise Architect, and IEEE Software. He is the author of Succeeding with Open Source (Addison-Wesley, August 2004), which has been has been described as presenting "some of the most valuable, practical advice I have seen on how to transform use of open source software from an accidental process into a powerful strategy for gaining an edge on the competition" (Terry Bollinger, author of the MITRE Corporation study "Use of Free and Open Source Software in the U.S. Department of Defense"), and a book that "walks you through every step of the evaluation process, and provides vital insights into the risks and benefits of making the open-source decision" (Kevin Bedell, Editor-in-Chief, LinuxWorld magazine).

John H Terpstra is CTO/President with PrimaStasys, Inc. He works with businesses to realign information technology practices with business goals. He is a member of the formation committee of the Desktop Linux Consortium, a long term member of the Samba Team (a major Open Source project), and a well known contributor and visionary in the open source community with a very active commercial focus. He is a member of the Open Source Software Institute Advisory Board. He has worked with the LSB, Li18nux (now OpenI18N.Org), and the LPI — and is a best selling author of :

• The Official Samba-3 HOWTO & Reference Guide, ISBN: 0131453556
• Samba-3 by Example, ISBN: 0131472216
• Hardening Linux, ISBN: 0072254971
• OpenLDAP by Example, ISBN: 0131488732

John has worked with The SCO Group (previously Caldera Inc.) and TurboLinux Inc., in VP-level positions. Prior to moving to the USA in 1999, John founded and managed Aquasoft Pty Ltd (Aust.) for 10 years. He has a Graduate Diploma in Marketing (with Credit), UTS Aust. and an Applied Science Certificate in Chemistry, QUT (Aust.).

(from his bio at mvista.com) James Ready, with over 25 years of technical and entrepreneurial experience, is a recognized authority in the embedded systems and real-time software industry. Co-founder of Ready Systems, he pioneered the development of the first commercially viable, real-time operating system (RTOS) product - the VRTX real-time kernel. Ready Systems, founded in 1980, merged with Microtec Research in 1993, went public in 1994, and was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1995. During this period, James served as Ready Systems' President, and as chief technical officer (CTO) at Microtec/Mentor. James founded MontaVista in 1999 to provide the Linux operating system to the embedded systems market, and to offer embedded-system expertise to the open source Linux community. Jim got his BA from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971 and his MA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976.

Tom Fulton is a Senior Systems Engineer for Novell/SUSE Linux in San Jose. Tom is also an SVLUG member, and joined the SBAY Speakers Bureau, which schedules speakers for SVLUG, BAFUG, PenLUG, and LUGoD, at the time he signed up to speak. He originally made this Introduction to Snort IDS presentation at Novell's Brainshare conference, and has been presenting the topic to several user groups. He will also talk about Snort IDS at the High Technology Crime Investigation Association in Washington DC, in September.

Chander Kant is founder and president of LinuxCertified, Inc, a leading provider of Linux laptops, training, and services. Chander has been involved with the technology and business sides of Linux in many different projects. As a key member of the open-source community, he is very enthusiastic about enabling Linux as a mainstream operating system. Prior to founding LinuxCertified, Chander was Director of Business Development at VERITAS software, where he was responsible for high-availability clustering products. Chander was also involved in architecting high-performance Linux compute servers at SGI. Chander is a co-author of "Linux Compute Clusters", an on-going open-license book.

(excerpt from his bio at rosenlaw.com) Lawrence E. (Larry) Rosen is both an attorney and a computer specialist. As an attorney, Larry's specialty is technology, but he is also a skilled litigator and negotiator, and is a legal advisor to individuals and companies throughout the world. He also has extensive experience teaching computer programming, and has been a department and product manager in the computer and communications industries.

Larry is very involved in the open source community. He is the general counsel and secretary of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), and served as its executive director. OSI reviews and approves major open source licenses, several of which were written by Larry. OSI manages and promotes the Open Source Definition for the good of the community, specifically through the OSI Certified open source software certification mark and program. Larry often publishes and speaks around the world on open source licensing and patent issues.

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major free scripting languages. He created Python in the early 1990s at CWI in Amsterdam, and is still actively involved in the development of the language.

In 1995, he moved to the US; first to work for CNRI in Reston, VA as a researcher, then for Zope Corporation as Director of PythonLabs, and, since 2003, after a move to the SF Bay Area, for Elemental Security.

His home on the Web is http://www.python.org/~guido/.

As Linux cluster computing continues its high rate of adoption, more and more organizations are faced with data management challenges posed by emerging distributed computing approaches. Large-scale cluster and grid computing approaches are based on the ability to decompose a compute workload into thousands or millions of tasks, each of which is executed independently (or almost independently). This strategy requires the creation and management of data partitions and replicas that are used by the compute nodes. Management of these partitions and replicas poses a number of operational challenges, especially in large cluster and grid computing environments, and in environments where core datasets change regularly.

This presentation will identify and explore these challenges, and will present solutions drawing on common approaches used in implementing "high throughput" applications. Examples will draw from multiple disciplines, including life sciences, earth sciences, and government and commercial applications.

Bruce Moxon is the Vertical Marketing Manager at Panasas, a high performance, next-generation storage networking company, where he works with customers, industry experts, and hardware and software partners to help Panasas deliver on the promise of shared storage cluster computing solutions for high throughput applications. Mr. Moxon's experience in high performance computing and very large database (VLDB) systems affords him a unique perspective critical to the success of these data-intensive solutions. He recently architected, designed, and implemented a high throughput computational pipeline and analytical data warehouse for Perlegen Sciences' 100+ TB human genome variation (SNP) repository. Mr. Moxon also teaches Bioinformatics and Computer Science courses at the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension program.

Peter Thoeny - Peter@ThoenySTOPSPAM.com, software developer with over 15 years experience, with interests in corporate collaboration, Web technology and UI design. Peter is the author of the open source collaboration software TWiki, managed the project over the last four years. Peter was graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He lived in Japan for 8 years working as an engineering manager for Denso, the largest auto electric parts supplier in Japan. Now Peter is in the Silicon Valley for 5 years, managing the Engineering Operations group at Wind River.

On 12 December 1991, Paul Kunz installed the first Web server outside of European SLAC.  Today, if you do not have access to the Web, you are considered disadvantaged.

Before it made sense for Tim Berners-Lee to invent the Web at CERN, there had to a number of ingredients in place. Paul will present a history of how these ingredients were developed, and the role the academic research community had in producing them. In particular, he will address the roles played by big science, including high energy physics, in giving us the World Wide Web and the Internet as we know them today.

Paul Kunz received his Ph. D. from Princeton University in 1968, and first went to CERN that year to do an experiment as a member of the Saclay group.  In 1971, he went on to Michigan State and worked on one of the first experiments at Fermilab.  He joined SLAC in 1974 where he has been ever since.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Kunz invented the 168/E emulators and the concept of event processing via parallel processor farms.  Dr. Kunz has been a pioneer amongst physics colleagues in adopting new computer technologies.  Examples include his move to UNIX and object-oriented programming over ten years ago.  Lately, he has been giving a course, "C++ for Particle Physicists," a course that has now been held fifty-one times all over the world for more than 1700 students.

An in-depth look at a cluster filesystem for Linux designed for database operations and the future direction of the project to move towards designing a general-purpose cluster filesystem. Including a demo and a description on how to set up a homebrew cluster for real cheap using Firewire storage.

Wim Coekaerts is Director of Linux Engineering Corporate Architecture for Oracle Corporation. His group looks at how Linux needs to evolve and how Oracle can contribute to ensuring large enterprise companies can adopt it quickly. Within Oracle's "Linux kernel group," Mr. Coekaerts is involved in prototyping and doing research in clustering technologies in Linux as well as single node features.

Guy Sotomayor, Platform Software Architect at Digeo, will demonstrate Digeo's Moxi Media Center. Moxi is a Linux-based super set-top box that incorporates a wide range of capabilities such as DVR (Digital Video Recorder), HDTV, Internet/router/firewall/gateway capabilities, DVD playback, the management of music playlists from your CDs and computer, and digital photo viewing. Also, through one simple menu, the consumer can access all this entertainment throughout the home.

Guy Sotomayor is a platform architect at Digeo, Inc. Guy manages the system software and build teams, and is chiefly responsible for the development of Linux OS for an embedded platform and the tools to support it.

Most human-computer interaction work has focused on end users of computing systems. Another important class of computer users, however, is the cohort of administrators who design, build, maintain, and troubleshoot computer systems. These highly-expert users are vital for the operation of our "e-everything" world, yet little effort has gone into studying their work and developing tools that help them be effective. This is especially important because the labor associated with operating large computational systems is increasingly outstripping the cost of the technology itself.

Our research group is performing a series of ethnographic studies of system administrators in their work environments. This presentation will include results from these studies, as well as information developed at a CHI2003 workshop on system administration as users; this workshop brought together researchers, developers, and practitioners from industry and academia.

From this group and from our own work, a consistent set of paradoxes is beginning to emerge. First, tremendous effort has gone into the design of powerful GUI tools for system administration. Many tools have been developed and validated with established user-centered design methodologies. Yet field studies repeatedly find system administrators ignoring these tools and falling back on the standard command shell and least-common denominator tools such as 'grep' and 'vi'. Second, system administration is a highly collaborative activity, with a heavy dependence on instant messaging, email, telephone, and face-to-face interaction. Yet system administration tools rarely include collaboration aids, instead seemingly assuming that these workers toil away silently and alone. Third, effective operation and problem resolution requires an accurate mental model of how the system functions. "Situation awareness" theory dictates that a model starts with sensory input, develops with mental comprehension, and results in predictions of system behavior. Yet, large-scale systems have few and un-integrated sensing mechanisms, and are too complex for any single person to comprehend, resulting in unpredictable behavior.

This presentation will illustrate each of the three paradoxes with examples from field experience, and offer suggestions for how the HCI community can move forward to resolve them.

Rob Barrett is a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California, where he works in the Services Research group that aims to bring value from human-computer interaction research to the IBM Global Services organization. His current work focuses on the user experience of system administration and human aspects of autonomic computing. Previous work includes an intermediary approach to designing Web applications, optimization of pointing devices, track-following servo systems for tape data storage, and atomic-scale imaging. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University and has earned masters and bachelors degrees in physics, electrical engineering and theology. He has over 40 refereed publications and 16 patents in fields ranging from applied math to physics and computer science.

Bastille Linux hardens an operating system by deactivating unused programs or functionality, tweaking security-related settings, and employing other standard "tricks" like chroot prisons to block or contain attacks. Bastille currently locks down five Linux distributions, HP-UX and Mac OS X. This talk will introduce Bastille and explore how it can be easily extended to include new functionality, requiring only minimal knowledge of Perl. In the process of understanding how Bastille works, we'll discuss and demonstrate what actions Bastille takes on a sample system. This talk should prove useful to non-programmers who want to understand how to harden an operating system by hand or with automated tools. It will definitely be useful to Perl programmers who wish to extend Bastille.

Jay Beale is a security specialist focused on host lockdown and security audits. He is the Lead Developer of the Bastille project, which creates a hardening script for Linux, HP-UX, and Mac OS X, a member of the Honeynet Project, and a core participant in the Center for Internet Security. A frequent conference speaker and trainer, Jay speaks and trains at the Black Hat and LinuxWorld conferences, among others. A senior research scientist with the George Washington University Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute, Jay makes his living as a security consultant through Baltimore-based JJBSec, LLC, reachable via www.jjbsec.com.

Jay writes the Center for Internet Security's Unix host security tool, currently in use worldwide by organizations from the Fortune 500 to the Department of Defense. He maintains the Center's Linux Security benchmark document, and, as a core participant in the non-profit Center's Unix team, is working with private enterprises and US agencies to develop Unix security standards for industry and government.

Aside from his CIS work, Jay has written a number of articles and book chapters on operating system security. He is a columnist for Information Security Magazine and previously wrote a number of articles for SecurityPortal.com and SecurityFocus.com. He authored the Host Lockdown chapter in 'Unix Unleashed,' served as the security author for 'Red Hat Internet Server' and co-authored 'Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection.' Jay's currently finishing the Addison Wesley book, 'Locking Down Linux.'

Formerly, he served as the Security Team Director for MandrakeSoft, helping set company strategy, design security products, and pushing security into the third largest retail Linux distribution. He now works to further the goal of improving operating system security. To read Jay's past articles and learn about his past and future conference talks, take a look at his site at www.bastille-linux.org/jay.

The Zaurus line of PDAs from Sharp Electronics are powerful Linux-based handheld computers. Sporting fast CPUs and lots of RAM, dual expansion slots, built-in keyboard, and Java runtime environment, they are capable of handling a wide range of tasks: Addressbook and calendar; Web browsing; 3D video games with stereo sound; MP3 and video playback; voice recorder; Apache Web server with MySQL database; remote desktop control with VNC.

Bill Kendrick has ported a number of games to the Zaurus, and created the Unofficial Zaurus FAQ. He's currently president of the growing Linux Users' Group of Davis, near Sacramento.

Bill Kendrick is an open source software developer living in Davis, California, where he's the president, public relations officer, and webmaster of the local 350-member Linux Users Group.

He has written about 20 games for Linux and other platforms — his most recent being 'Tux Paint', a drawing program geared towards young children. Bill created, but hasn't had the time recently to maintain, the "Unofficial Zaurus FAQ." He is active in numerous online communities.

Adam Bertsch is a Sr. Systems Administrator at Sony Computer Entertainment, America. Adam is responsible for the Linux kit Web site in the United States and Canada, as well as evangelism for the Linux kit. Adam also pushes Linux within the corporate culture at SCEA, and works with the Research and Development group in a more traditional sysadmin capacity. Adam came to SCEA from VA Linux Systems in 2001, where he was a member of the Professional Services team working with security, high capacity/availability servers, and SourceForge(tm).

Jim Reese joined Google in 1999 as employee No. 18. Since that time, Jim has played a key role in managing the hardware and network infrastructure development to support Google's growth. Specifically, Jim directed the expansion of Google's server farm and network from 300 machines to the current number of more than 10,000. To manage all of these machines, Jim implemented a highly automated system for remotely administering and monitoring the entire cluster. Jim also contributed to optimizing Google's network to transfer the terabytes of data involved in the search engine index. Prior to joining Google, Jim worked as a neurologic and computer consultant for SRI International. At SRI, he helped to develop software for qualitative analysis of magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of the human brain.

Jim received a BA in biology from Harvard and an MD from Yale medical school. In addition to having been a singer and guitarist in a number of bands that have released several CDs, Jim is a trained neurosurgeon.

The astonishing success of free software systems in changing the face of the computer world — in under twenty years — has led many free and open source software advocates to see our movement as an unstoppable force. Created around the same time as the Macintosh, the GNU system has been said to have a comparable market share, even though it was largely created by volunteers. Apache has not just a plurality but even a majority of the Web server market, and Linux adoption continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

These successes in market share, corresponding successes in mind share, and a robust, growing, and increasingly sophisticated developer community can make the free software world look like a force of nature. Some unwary advocates now see the triumph of free software as a foregone conclusion, or an inevitability.

"Historical inevitability" is no more reasonable in engineering than it has been in other contexts. Free software has been viewed from the outside as an anomaly (or, sometimes, as a threat). It is increasingly the focal point of political struggles, and it is too early to say what the outcome of those struggles will be. I will review the story of the DVD Wars, the broader debates over copyright policy, current regulatory initiatives. I will also discuss new technologies such as software-defined radio and trusted computing, and emphasize that free software's future is far from assured.

Seth Schoen