Red Hat Summit was great. I manned the Open Source Java booth on the show floor. There was a lot of interest in what we’re doing, and people were impressed to hear that the OpenJDK packages in Fedora pass the TCK. I showed a few IcedTea demos including IcedTea Web Start and gcjwebplugin. Notably, they were running on my daily-use Fedora 9 notebook with the current OpenJDK packages; unlike at previous conferences where I always had to show development versions, this time I just browsed to interesting demo sites and everything just worked. Knowing that any Fedora 9 machine would run the same demos out-of-the-box was a nice feeling.
Every single person I talked to about OpenJDK asked me about the plugin. I had to give them an answer with caveats. Hopfully those caveats can be eliminated by Fedora 10, and from then on I can say IcedTea provides a plugin that Just Works.
I attended talks by Sami Wagiaalla (Frysk), Andrew Overholt (Eclipse) and Richard Hughes (power management). I was already familiar with the first two subjects but I really enjoyed Richard’s talk. I liked his point that GNU/Linux distributions can beat proprietary operating systems on battery life/data centre cost because we control the entire stack of software and thus can audit for and patch out wasteful power consumption.
The Fenway Park tour was terrific, what a quaint stadium! Now I really want to see a game there.
FUDCon was fun too. Andrew Overholt and I shared a time slot, thanks to the Barcamp format with which I was previously unfamiliar. I gave my IcedTea/OpenJDK status spiel, which I had honed over the past four days at the Summit. Other talks I attended: Secondary Arches, Augeas, Kernel, and Upstart. All talks indicate Fedora making great progress. FUDCon was the first I had heard of talk.fedoraproject.org; nice to hear Paul Frields keeping it real by entertaining totally crazy (but maybe brilliant!) ideas like offering free phone support for Fedora. 🙂
All-in-all a fun trip. Nice to be in Boston for the Celtics win, just so I can say I was there.