---
name: Open Source Summit, days 2-4
composer: c4lliope
summary: More niches! Some convergence.
labels:
  - open source
  - confer
  - linux
---

The days passed quickly!

Because being precise in the midst of such a blur is impossible,
I'll relay that I had some really good discussions!
Only some of them concerned linux or open source.

Somehow, my Hyprland desktop came up and someone mentioned
that the lead coder has some... people issues,
as [so many of us do](/chronicle/chills).

Because I missed the day 1 description of [Cosmic DE],
I changed a couple lines in my Nix configs and after a long,
conference-wifi download I was up and running.
The [keybindings] make basic sense, and I'm making progress as usual.

[Cosmic DE]: https://system76.com/cosmic/
[keybindings]: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/57502897/191095328-d6f0d2f8-54ee-4732-9852-62440c3d19e8.png

Somehow System76 has no presence in the sponsor's playground,
so I spent a piece of an hour speaking to Framework!
They had their new touchscreen on display,
alongside their desktop and a sleek rack-mount 4x desktop lab.
The 16" input modules are some peak engineering;
I had an engineer run `lsusb` as he plugged and unplugged them.
I'm super impressed, needless to say.

Incidentally, the Framework lads had been amused
to pull up my old Jira ticket -
on Jan 4, 2022 I had been the first order shipping to Washington, DC;
I asked someone to add the district to their e-commerce form.

- - -

In the middle of the conference I paused
to message one of my collaborator groups on Slack:

> Hi, clicking in from the Linux Open Source Summit in Denver;
> A couple people are discussing distributed (dispersed) data lakes (record collections).
> These include:

> - <https://lfedge.org/projects/edgelake/>
> - <https://gravitino.apache.org/>

> these options are groundbreaking ways to solve a problem we may have someday:
> connecting different databases and sources.

> Our lab-location problem is more properly called "High Availability" or "Disaster Recovery".
> The usual approach is to combine "Replication" and "Failover".
> This normally requires reading long incomprehensible explanations:

> - <https://www.enterprisedb.com/postgres-tutorials/postgresql-replication-and-automatic-failover-tutorial>

> We can be unusual though!

> This open-source DB is designed to be multi-machine, and a drop-in replacement for postgres.
> The other apps like Airflow or Tableau should have no idea the underlying program is changing.

> - <https://www.yugabyte.com/>
> - <https://github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db>

- - -

And speaking of Slack,
I am a new member of some buzzing new groups:
[OpenSearch][os-slack] and [CHAOSS][c-slack].

Now, in the 4th-day mini-summit,
I'm on the special [CHAOSS] track.
After a couple days of high-IQ discussions,
I found some refuge in discussions of docs, inclusion, onboarding,
and the more human sides of open source management.

[os-slack]: https://app.slack.com/client/T01QQ0Q5GMA
[CHAOSS]: https://chaoss.community/
[c-slack]: https://app.slack.com/client/TV03AS82H

CHAOSS is the main group appraising open-source health on a global basis.
They produce [education programs] and open-source apps to help us explore
the science of coding, using the public records of authorship
inherent to open-source.

[education programs]: https://chaoss.community/chaoss-education-project/

- - -

Today is a deep examination of how to measure open-source community.

Phase one in the process is to mine the rich resource collections:
you can use [GrimoireLab] or [Augur].
Augur is the source behind [8knot], a dashboard core to CHAOSS.

[GrimoireLab]: https://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab
[Augur]: https://github.com/chaoss/augur
[8knot]: https://metrix.chaoss.io

One of the speakers mentioned having authored a blog post for
[opensource.com](https://opensource.com/), which seems to be experiencing
many Drupal and AJAX errors!

I'm in the middle of an employment application as a Drupal manager,
so I may seek to help on their app if possible.
Oddly enough, I see no source-code links among their pages.

These authors mentioned the [Cardano](https://cardano.org/) blockchain
as a peer-reviewed blockchain geared towards paying open-source coders.
Yay! These speakers also authored [Mozilla & the Rebel Alliance]
and [similar reports] examining community relationships.

[Mozilla & the Rebel Alliance]: https://report.mozilla.community/
[similar reports]: https://bitergia.com/radar-report-hedera-crypto-ecosystems-2024/

I'm marginally sad to have missed a discussion on [Ecosyste.ms],
and eager to explore this domain more as soon as possible.
I had absconded from the CHAOSS track for that talk,
to go see how to apply [Guardrails for AI apps].

[Ecosyste.ms]: https://ecosyste.ms/
[Guardrails for AI apps]: https://foundation-model-stack.github.io/fms-guardrails-orchestrator

- - -

Hopping back to Tuesday as I examine my open pages,
I had been super pleased to see the author of Wireshark
explain [StratoShark], an analogous program he has made to explore
system calls.

[StratoShark]: https://stratoshark.org/

The key idea behind this program is to be
essentially a clone of WireShark;
the `.pcap` capture file for packets uses the same
encoding as the `.scap` files for system calls.
The audience asked around the possibility of building an app,
perhaps a web UI, to display both captures in chronological order.

"Sure", he said. "In the base of the repo there is a [sharkd] daemon,
and someone has had success communicating to that process
from a WebUI before." [paraphrased]

[sharkd]: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/blob/master/sharkd.h

- - -

Now, I'm sure more is going to emerge from this conference
in the days to come; I'll spend many more public-library sessions
in my email inbox and blog, perhaps uploading images from my camera.

Which reminds me - I had a chance to ask a Sony patent engineer
about my Alpha DLSR; we discussed how nearly all
serious camera companies are made in Japan,
and we double-checked where [Hombu Dojo] is (Shinjuku).

I need to spend much more time learning Japanese,
and besides, this may be the primary appeal of the Open Source Summit;
the highly international audience in attendence.

I'm making connections, and am eager build a much broader dialogue
around these ideas in the days and months ahead.
