Foundation at Indiana LinuxFest

Indiana LinuxFest will be held at the Wyndham Indianapolis West Hotel in Indianapolis, IN from Friday July 26 to Sunday July 28. Registration is free for this event.

There will be a FreeBSD booth in the Expo area on Saturday, July 27 from 8:00-18:30. Stop by to say hi, discuss the Foundation's work, or to donate to the FreeBSD Foundation.

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for EuroBSDCon 2013

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to EuroBSDCon 2013.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit  the Travel Grant Request Application by August 19th, 2013 to apply for this grant. Instructions can be found in the announcement.

This program is open to FreeBSD developers, kernel hackers,  documentation authors, bugbusters, and system administrators, etc.  In some  cases, we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct request to us.

The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

OpenHelp Trip Report: Warren Block

Open Help is an annual conference for people who write documentation for an open source project. The Foundation sponsored Warren Block from the FreeBSD documentation team to attend this year. He writes:

In June, I attended the Open Help Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Open Help focuses on open source documentation.  Dru Lavigne attended also, and Tom Rhodes arrived for a doc sprint.

This year's attendance was larger than last year, and the changing group dynamics are always interesting.  There was a sign-in session on Friday night at a restaurant in downtown, on Fountain square.

The conference began in earnest on Saturday.  There were some very tantalizing presentations.

Jorge Castro, of Red Hat, spoke about their use of StackExchange for user support.  A key point was that forums and mailing lists are good for discussion, but not very good for user support.  StackExchange is good for user support because discussion is very limited.  The description of how this had improved user support for Red Hat was very interesting.  One problem with using this system for FreeBSD is that it is proprietary.  The StackExchange system is "software as a service", and the software is not open.  For that reason alone, it probably would not fly for FreeBSD.  Still, we could use many of the concepts, like the idea that outdated docs in search results can be worse than no results at all.  That idea was restated by several presenters and attendees.  It comes up a lot.

We have encountered it in FreeBSD, too.  One possible approach I have tried to combat this was about an outdated setting for X11 called AllowEmptyInput.  No amount of corrections seemed to make any difference... until I tried pulling instead of pushing.  Rather than just keep trying to correct the information, I decided I would make it famous.  So I wrote a small article that talked about the problem, the solution, and then ridiculed it.   Surprisingly, that
worked.  However, it does not scale well for all the bad advice out there.

So StackExchange sounds great, but would probably not work for FreeBSD. The very next talk was by Michael Verdi of Mozilla, about the Sumo Project, their homegrown support system.  It shared some of the features of StackExchange, but their Kitsune software is open, and built in Django.  This is something we really should test.  First we need to talk someone into creating a port, but that is a technicality.

Richard Bowen, also of Red Hat, made several interesting points in his presentation, "Listening to your Audience".  One of them was that regardless of your project, your default documentation is StackOverflow. I'm not sure that is true for FreeBSD, but it's an interesting concept. Another idea is that of finding how users got to your documents.  Did they find what they needed?  Or will they go elsewhere?

We also had group discussions and short presentations throughout the day.  Open Help is very informal and freewheeling.

On Sunday, more full presentations were given.  Again, they had areas which directly addressed problems the FreeBSD Documentation Project has encountered.  Lee Hunter spoke about using Drupal for technical communications, and component content management systems.  The idea of being able to write a technical section once, use and reuse it throughout documentation, and being able to revise it in one place really resonated.  For example, we have multiple sections in the Handbook that talk about partitioning hard drives.  They are all different, all incomplete, and difficult to update.  Imagine having one section that is simply included as an object in different parts of the documentation, yet is still only a single piece to maintain.

Jorge Castro gave a quick presentation on discourse.org, a site from one of the StackExchange founders.  It is aimed at reinventing the web forum with some very interesting concepts.

Siko Bouterse and Jake Orlowitz of Wikipedia spoke about their Teahouse project, trying to put the humanity back in technical support.  Their project is kind of the antithesis of StackExchange.  Rather than all-business user support with nothing else, it's a conversational, friendly tone to which moderators must agree beforehand.  Participation by women in this new style of support group is about ten times that of the normal forums, a stunning success.

Peter Coombe, also of Wikipedia, spoke about fixing Wikipedia help pages.  This was yet another presentation that dealt with topics the FreeBSD Documentation Project has encountered.  Help pages become long and complicated, addressing unusual situations that most users will not experience.  It can drive off the people looking for simple help.  I find our Handbook chapters on setting up X11, printing, and wireless networking in that situation.  There is lots of information, but 90% of users are looking for a common answer which can get lost in all the details.  We need to address this with simple quick-start introductions, answering the most common, simple questions first.

Also addressed in this talk was the concept of "sunk costs".  We have seen this, where even though some document is long obsolete, people are reluctant to retire it because of the effort that was put into creating it.  That can be addressed, but it takes understanding.  I think it will help to move old documents into an archive rather than just deleting them.  They will still be available, but also will not be confused with current documents.

Janet Swisher, of Mozilla, spoke about doing doc sprints and book sprints.  Dru has hosted more than a few FreeBSD doc sprints, and they do help.  I feel that in-person attendance gives the best results, and that is difficult for us because most contributors are not employed to work on FreeBSD.

Shaun McCance, organizer of the conference and Gnome documentation team leader, spoke about translations and showed his itstool (in ports as textproc/itstool) for extracting translatable content from XML files, then merging it back in after translation.  Gnome is using this to add subtitles and translated subtitles to help video.

We need to revamp the way we do translations for FreeBSD documentation. Translators already have a difficult task of translating very technical content into a second language--and sometimes a third.  They get no programmatic help to accomplish this, it's all manual.  Gnome has translations into 80 languages.  We do not.  If we can make it easier for translators, we can get more translations, faster, and into new languages.  This really needs to be a high priority, and we need to get a group of translators together to consider newer approaches.

I gave a small presentation about FreeBSD and what types of documentation we produce, and how.  We have some famous successes, like the Handbook and our man pages.  We also have many opportunities for improvement.  Some of those opportunities seem simple when viewed from the outside.  In many cases, difficulties arise due to the sheer length of time that FreeBSD has existed.  FreeBSD predates XML, for instance. But we can improve our documentation, and we can make the process of creating and translating it easier.

On Monday, Dru led a FreeBSD doc sprint.  And she did lead, we did a lot of things that needed to be accomplished to prepare for the upcoming print version of the Handbook.  Tom Rhodes also arrived on Monday, and between the three of us, we finished off more than could be reasonably expected of five.

Monday night, there was a bourbon tasting event, which was unusual and surprisingly educational.

And with that, Open Help 2013 came to a close.  A fun event in a great town with lots of ideas, concrete improvements during the doc sprint, and directions for future improvements to FreeBSD documentation and FreeBSD as a whole.

I want to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip to Open Help this year, and Tom Rhodes for his help, and most particularly Dru Lavigne for her help and guidance and refusal to accept excuses.

Playstation 4 uses FreeBSD 9.0

The operating system powering the Playstation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a Sony spin of FreeBSD 9.0.

FreeBSD's 20th makes the news

There have been several folks writing about FreeBSD's 20th Anniversary, here's an article from Sam Varghese covering how FreeBSD continues to grow in popularity.

Take up on the Rise as FreeBSD turns 20

BSDCan Trip Report: Florian Smeets

The next trip report is from Florian Smeets. He writes:

I arrived in Ottawa on Tuesday afternoon. In the evening I went to the Royal Oak to meet other fellow developers.

Wednesday was the first day of the Devsummit. The day started with a presentation about the FreeBSD.org security incident and about how Netflix is using FreeBSD for their CDN.

In the afternoon I attended the ports session where we saw presentations about features that were added to the ports tree in the last year and also about stuff that people will be working on during the next year.

On Thursday I went to the VM I/O Concurrency and Virtualization sessions. In the first session, we talked about all the performance work that is currently happening that should be in the 10.0 release. In the second session, there was a lot of talk about Bhyve and we saw a demo of Linux running in Bhyve.

In the evening I attended the Vendor summit, which I find quite interesting, as you get a picture of the needs of other people and also what they are working on.

Friday was the first day of the actual conference. After talks about dtrace and git, I attended a talk about benchmarking FreeBSD. One of the slides even showed results I posted some time ago.

The next talk I saw was switching from Linux to FreeBSD, which gave some interesting insights into the differences of the two systems from someone else. Which was quite interesting as I've been working for a Linux based company for the last 6 months.

After the FreeBSD Birth to Death talk, I attended the Mozilla on OpenBSD talk. Landry, the OpenBSD Mozilla maintainer, is an OpenBSD and Mozilla committer. He helped us in committing a lot of our patches upstream. At the social event in the evening, I finally had a chance to meet him in person. We talked for a long time and made plans. Now, 4 weeks after the conference, we have a mozilla-central buildbot running in a Bhyve, so we will be informed about breakages automatically from now on. This will be a huge help, as we can try to fix those kind of things before the releases and fix them with our own patches in the ports tree.

On the last day of the conference I attended a talk about using Puppet to manage FreeBSD and about the FreeBSD.org cluster refit. In the afternoon I didn't attend talks, but took the time and sat down with some other developers to discuss future projects.

As my flight was only leaving on Sunday evening, I went into town with a couple of other developers to do some sightseeing. In the evening, the long journey back home started and an eventful and exhaustive week came to an end.

BSDCan Trip Report: Warren Block

The next trip report is from Warren Block. He writes:

A two-day developer summit was held before BSDCan itself began.  On Wednesday, there were presentations to the whole group on the security incident last year and how NetFlix uses FreeBSD.  It's interesting to note that somewhere around 20% of North American internet traffic is served by NetFlix systems running FreeBSD.  Individual group meetings began in the afternoon, and I attended the UEFI boot session.  Beyond the topic of UEFI booting and FreeBSD, I found some people to help with creating a man page for gptboot.

That night, we had our first session of the "doc lounge" proposed last year by Dru Lavigne.  The concept was for a doc sprint, but also to be available for users and other developers who either wanted to see a specific correction to the documentation, or to have an introduction to start working on documentation themselves.

Thursday morning, I met with Peter N. M. Hansteen, author of the famous "Book of PF".  Several years ago, he submitted a patch to include a PF tutorial in the Handbook.  He mentioned it to me at BSDCan last year, and this year, we completed integrating it.  It will be committed to the Handbook after the upcoming release of FreeBSD 8.4.

That afternoon, the doc developer summit was held.  The biggest issue was ongoing work on a new print version of the Handbook.  Dru has done a tremendous amount of good work on this so far.  There is more to be done, and technical and social issues to address.  On other subjects, we also talked about important FreeBSD killer features that have not been well-documented or publicized in the Handbook or other documentation. Also mentioned were the need for more doc people and more translators.

On Friday and Saturday, the BSDCan presentations were given.  As usual, there is always a conflict with scheduling where multiple talks are held at the same time. Fortunately, the slides are online.  Even better, the good people of FOSSLC again recorded the talks, and they will be showing up on Youtube.  If you could not attend in person, this is the next best thing.

All the talks were good, but two in particular stood out for me.  The first was Allan Jude's talk on using Puppet to manage multiple FreeBSD systems.  Even if you are a fan of CFEngine or Chef, it's worth seeing for comparison.  If you aren't already using one of these automation systems, it's a great introduction.

The second talk that really made an impression was a summary by Justin Gibbs of what the FreeBSD Foundation has planned for the future.  Besides the phenomenal success of their fundraising in 2012, he detailed plans for the Foundation's expansion with more staff and more projects.  One point that I had not really understood before was what they meant when they said individual donations were needed, no matter the amount.  A few large corporate donors are fine if it's just about the total amount of money needed.  But the number of individual donors is also a way to tell hardware vendors the relative popularity of FreeBSD.  That's why every FreeBSD user should donate to the Foundation, even if it's just $5. Half-joking, I stood near the Foundation table and reminded people walking past without the "I donated" sticker that they should donate. To my surprise, every single person I talked to actually did stop and donate.  There was actually a sort of traffic jam at one point.  The Efika ARM notebook running FreeBSD--another Foundation-funded project--also attracted a crowd to the table.

The Friday night doc lounge was canceled due to a scheduling conflict with a BSDCan social event, but we had another session on Saturday night.  For me, that was the most successful.  Again, we had people with no experience with FreeBSD documentation show up.  The level of interest and the dedication shown was very interesting.  Clearly, people care, and we need to make it as easy as possible to contribute new content or patches for existing documents.

In many ways, I found the doc lounge to be the most valuable and educational part of the trip.  Trying to help a new person get the doc tools installed and working showed places where there is room for improvement, and there is always important feedback when working with people trying to use those tools for the first time.  There is also the "what's that?" factor, where one user sees another using a tool or technique they had not known about before.

BSDCan 2013 was hectic and packed full of content.  As always, it was well worth the trip.

People and groups to thank:

The FreeBSD Foundation, sponsors of my attendance at BSDCan this year.

Dan Langille, the person responsible for BSDCan.

Peter N. M. Hansteen, for his patience and help in getting the PF tutorial section for the Handbook completed.

FOSSLC  and Andrew Ross for their recording of presentations so those who could not be present have a chance to see them.

And finally, thanks to all the great people who attended.