I live in Atlanta and took some time last Tuesday night to attend CloudCamp Atlanta. I’ve worked with what we now call “cloud” technologies for quite a while. One of the highlights of my visit was a chance to meet Luke Kaines of Reductive Labs. As a few people around the office know I’m a big fan of Puppet. Luke was in town speaking at CCA from his native Nashville and I sat in on his session.

So if you don’t know about Puppet I’ll explain briefly. System administrators who run a _lot_ of systems can take at least two different approaches:

• Imperative: Write mountains of scripting code to diagnose what system administration actions need to be conducted.
• Declarative: Define a model which states how the system should look and let the tool bang the system into compliance.

Puppet is a declarative system. One uses a special domain specific language to describe a multi-system configuration. Puppet compiles this manifest and ships it out to nodes. Each locally installed version of puppet then tweaks the system until it matches the manifest.

I used Puppet on an internal project here at work… so that was why I was interested in meeting Luke. He had some interesting statements on the nature of open source community that I found intriguing and applicable to any realm of computing… even embedded. These aren’t quotes… just recollections.

A community will likely get you a lot of marketers and maybe some developers: There is a #puppet IRC channel on freenode.org that according to Luke routinely has 200+ developers sitting on it. There is also a
very active email list. These “marketers” are profoundly helpful and it was my observation that Luke didn’t mean it as a slight. He did go one to elaborate that there was really a very small core of developers who did core Puppet work.

Those marketers might be quite powerful: The room at 15-20 people in it and many of them displayed not just awareness of Puppet but actual expertise. That’s something for a tool which has minimal commercial backing and is rather young relative to its class (4-5 years). There was even, at the same time, a presentation on going at Linux.conf.au which was reportedly very popular.

In my mind I start to wonder what is the right balance between skilled developers and passionate marketers for a commercially backed open source project? Luke has taken a very open approach. Reductive Labs is a small shop right now that pays their bills and has a very passionate user and marketing base. Do they have the right balance for the future? I don’t think I’d be listening to Luke at all if it weren’t for his community of marketers.

What about our realm of embedded software? I often think about a few different mobile and open source projects/standards of recent origin:

1. Google’s Android
2. the LiMO Foundation
3. the LiPS Forum (now merged with LiMO)

or in the closer to earth real time Linux realm:

1. the Ingo/Gleixner RT work
2. ex-FSM Labs’ RT-Core
3. RTAI

who out of these two groups of projects/standards has the most effective balance of passionate marketers and skilled developers? I think I’d have to pick #1 on both of them… but that’s just my opinion. What’s yours?

Brad

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.