High Integrity Software 2015 conference

I was asked to give one of the keynotes at this year's High Integrity Software Conference and I have to say that I enjoyed the entire event. It's probably one of the best technical conferences that I've been to for a while and I've been thinking about why that was the case. I think it's partly due to the fact that it was a very focussed themed event with multiple tracks for just a small part (4 talks) of the day so everyone at the event was able to concentrate on that main theme. In many ways it was similar to how conferences and workshops were "back in the day", before many of them seemed to need to try to appeal to everyone with all of the latests hot topics at the time.

The other thing that appealed to me was that I was asked to give a talk I hadn't given before: dependability issues for open source software. The presentation is now available and it was nice to be forced to put into a presentation things I've taken for granted for so many years. The feedback from the audience was very positive and then we were straight into a panel session on open source, which was also well attended with lots of great questions. Definitely a conference I'll remember for a long time and one I hope to go back to at some point.

Finally there was one presentation that stuck in my mind. It was by Professor Philip Koopman and worth reading. There's a video of a similar presentation he did previously and despite the fact it's not great quality, I recommend watching it if you're at all interested in dependable software for mission critical environments.

Is Cloud the death of open source?

Over the last few years I've been hearing from various quarters that Cloud (specifically PaaS) doesn't need or work well with open source. At least what some of these people mean is that business models that have worked well for non-PaaS open source don't necessarily work for PaaS. I think the jury is still out on that one. However, if you look around at PaaS implementations out there, or even further up and down the stack to include IaaS and SaaS, it's clear that open source is playing a major role. Whether it's OpenShift, OpenStack. MySQL, Linux or a plethora of other components, it's hard to find environments that aren't built on open source in one way or another. (Excluding closed source companies, of course!)

Now why do I mention this? Because I'm just back from JUDCon Brazil and this topic of conversation came up with some of the attendees. In fact they were suggesting that several of the most significant waves in software over the past few years and into the next few years, are fuelled by the innovation within disparate open source communities. When you look at cloud, mobile, ubiquitous computing etc. it's hard to disagree!