Papers I'm submitting

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

I'm submitting these papers to Linux Kongress (Cologne) and Linux Expo
(RTP, North Carolina). They won't take all of them, obviously.
Valerie's also submitting a paper to each conference.
We are currently _not_ planning to attend the USENIX event in New Orleans,
because it's 10 days after Cologne (and Cologne is less than days after the
one in North Carolina, given the time difference). It would be nice if
someone else would volunteer to talk about Debian in New Orleans.
Ian Jackson says he's not that good at getting talks together, so this is
an opportunity for another developer.

	Thanks

	Bruce

I would like to offer several papers, panels, and tutorials for you
to choose from. The one most important to me is "Linux and Free
Software - Implementing a Global Strategy", and I am hoping to debut
this program at both Linux Expo and Linux Kongress. I would then follow
this talk up with progress reports at later shows in the year such as the
Atlanta Linux Showcase in October.

Speaker Information:

Bruce Perens is president of Software in the Public Interest, the non-profit
organization that sponsors Debian (http://www.debian.org), Open Hardware,
and several other free software programs. He is a member of the steering
committee for the 86open project. He was the Debian project leader
for about 2.5 years, and is still active in supporting the Debian project
and managing its external communications. When not working on free software,
Bruce is a software engineer in the Studio Tools department at Pixar
Animation Studios, maker of "Toy Story".

Linux and Free Software - Implementing a Global Strategy

	50 minutes + question and answer period.

Linus stated a goal of "world domination", but has never outlined a strategy
to achieve it. It's time to get to work on the business and marketing
aspects of making Linux and Free Software more popular in the educational
and business markets. This is not a presentation of business opportunities,
but the mobilization and recruitment of a large non-profit effort to promote
our work to the world. This discussion includes:

	What business users are waiting for: A discussion of the services
	that the free software must provide before we will be acceptable
	to business users, and how we will provide them.

	A short discussion of "The Second Computer Revolution", our
	marketing presentation to business and educational users on the
	promise of Free Software and Linux.

	Free standards: A discussion of the 86open project, a project to
	achieve binary compatibility between various Linux and Unix systems.
	A discussion of the Open Hardware program, and how individuals
	and organizations can participate in recruiting manufacturers.

	Technology for the short-term: filling in the components
	that are still missing, and are necessary before some business
	and educational users will take us seriously. This will focus on
	graphical user interfaces and business applications, and how we can
	support their development.

	Transcending Unix: A successful marketing strategy for any software
	product includes long-term plans for its successor. Will there be a
	viable replacement for The X Window System? Will the Hurd supplant
	Linux? How can we support the development of successor systems, so
	that Free Software will maintain a technological lead?

	Action Items: how you can participate in all of the above.

Debugging Memory Allocation with "Electric Fence"

	50 minutes + question and answer period.

	A discussion by the author of the "Electric Fence" malloc()
	debugger. Electric Fence is included on the Red Hat, Debian,
	and Caldera, disks, and probably SuSe (I didn't check). A
	complete tutorial on how to use Electric Fence to debug your
	programs, and how I came up with the idea behind Electric
	Fence.

	Topics:
		What is a red-zone memory allocator?
		How are boundary violations detected?
		What is the run-time overhead of Electric Fence?
		How do you replace the allocator, and why?
		What kinds of violations can be detected?
		Data-alignment problems you might encounter.
		What about C++ and other languages besides C?
		Building Electric Fence on different platforms.
		Running Electric Fence.

Free Software Licensing

	Panel - 60 minutes.

	What kind of license should you apply to your free software?
	This panel discussion presents the advantages and disadvantages
	of various licensing forms - public domain, the GPL, the BSD
	license, the Artistic license, and the license applied to the
	Qt GUI toolkit. I will recruit other speakers who are attending
	the conference to this panel, so that we can represent all of
	the various viewpoints. Hopefully we can get someone from FSF,
	someone from Troll Tech or KDE, maybe even someone from one of
	the Free BSD's, since they so dislike the GPL. This is bound to
	be an interesting and somewhat contentious discussion. I'd say
	there should be 5 people on the panel, they should each get 5
	minutes to present their viewpoint and then the rest of the panel
	should be debate between them and Q&A from the audience.

The Debian Linux Distribution

	50 minutes + question and answer period.

	This is an improvement of the talk I presented last year at
	Linux Expo. It's an overview of the Debian system, including:
	how Debian is different from other Linux systems, its open
	development and its non-profit nature, its technical advantages
	and problems, its future plans, and how to include Debian in your
	product. You'll also learn how to become a Debian user or developer.

		Topics:

		Why another Linux distribution?
		How is Debian different?
		The open development paradigm.
		The non-profit organization.
		The Debian Free Software Guidelines.
		The Social Contract.
		Debian's package format, and our new package manager.
		Running an organization of 200 developers on the net.
		What's in Debian's next release?

Becoming a Debian Developer

	Tutorial - 2 hours, including question and answer periods

	A step-by-step explanation, with examples, of how to package
	programs for Debian. A disucssion of the Debian Policy Manual,
	the Debian Programmer's Manual, and other materials for Debian
	developers.

		How the Debian Project is organized.
		What tasks are available for volunteers to work on?
		Basics of the Debian Package Manager.
		How to build a Debian package.
		Using "debmake" to automate package building.
		How to deal with all of the various architectures.
		Liability and security.
		How to join the Debian project.
		Building custom Debian CDs.

The Computer Graphics of Pixar

	50 minutes, including question and answer period.

	I show a short video "Geri's Game", and some slides from the making
	of this short film as well as some from "Toy Story", and talk about
	how we make the computer animation behind these films. This is
	an improvement of the talk I gave at Linux Expo last year. It's
	probably good for a dinner talk if there's going to be a dinner.

I am requesting full sponsorship of my travel and lodging expenses by the
conference. If Valerie Gilbert's paper is accepted, I'll share a room with
her (we're married).

	Thanks

	Bruce Perens


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