Monthly Archives: August 2013

Vendor Summit at EuroBSDCon 2013

For the third year in a row, we’ll be organizing a Vendor Summit during the Developer Summit prior to the EuroBSDCon conference, this year in Malta on September 26 and 27. In previous years, we’ve had a number of presentations by companies, like NETASQ, pfSense and Netflix, on how they successfully built their products and services on top of FreeBSD, and how contributing code back to the community actually can save them money in the long term by reducing internal maintenance costs.

This year, I’d like to change to focus more towards an open discussion between vendors and other large consumers, not only so you can learn from each other, but also so the FreeBSD community can learn more on how their product is used. We’ve long heard that binary packages were the Achilles heal of FreeBSD. Are we on the right track with PKGNG? Java-support is another issue, but is there anything else you are missing that maybe some other company may have an existing solution for they may be able to contribute, but hadn’t thought about anyone else was looking for? Or maybe you have an problem that’s too big for one company to fix, but can be fixed if some of you together fund a project to do so. The FreeBSD Foundation might be able to help.

This is an invitation-only event, please contact me at erwin@freebsdfoundation.org if you would like to attend. If you have anything to present or any topic you would like to discuss, please contact me as well. This will be an informal event, but we welcome a few short presentations.

Ports and Packages Summit at EuroBSDCon 2013

The FreeBSD project has provided pre-built ready-to-install binary packages for many years on a best-effort basis. While these packages do work in a large number of cases, there are too many inconsistencies and failure combinations, from the unpredictable update frequency to dependency handling across upgrades, for them to be used on a wider scale. After many months of work, we’re nearing a paradigm shift in both the format of the packages, and the building and distribution of the packages with the new PKGNG tools.

At the upcoming Developer Summit at the EuroBSDCon conference in Malta on September 26 and 27, there will be another Ports and Packages Summit, which will center on a round-table brainstorm that begins with a summary of the tremendous progress made in the last 12 months, and closes with a discussion of the roadmap on how to improve binary package creation, distribution, installation and upgrading. Please contact me if you have any topics you’d like to present or discuss. It will be an informal gathering, no formal slides or presentations are required.

As always, the DevSummit is an invitation-only event, so also contact me at erwin@FreeBSD.org if you want to participate.