powdermonkey

AirGap! http://www.airgapit.com/
Coming out of stealth on the new company: AirGap!
is focused on helping to increase both the viability and the adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) for controlled or classified domains, otherwise known as the "paranoid" community. Obviously these include Defense, Intelligence, Homeland Security, and Law Enforcement as well as security minded commercial sectors like banking, finance, and pharmaceutical industries – that face significant risks.

While we focus on Open Source Software, we fully believe the same concerns exist and solutions apply to commercial software (COTS) as well.

Software is a problem for the Enterprise that is only growing. The processes (contracting, workflow, security) for getting software into an enterprise (across the gap) and then supporting, updating and evolving that software hasn’t kept pace with how rapidly modern software evolves and changes.

Current solutions in the Enterprise use fragmented processes resulting in software support slow, static and handcrafted, using people to create scale - not technology.

The AirGap Solution: Manage Enterprise Software as a Service

1 Bridge support from outside (public/commercial) to inside (controlled/classified) for software & technologies
2 Commoditize & increase use of vetted source code
3 Deliver continuous support model for software with security

The Key? Deliver support on a fixed price subscription model – pay for what you need, not extra bodies.

How can this remain cost effective? A
utomate the process & scale with technology not people

Military Systems + Process = Technical Debt

I was just reading through the literature on Technical Debt (see Ward's Technical Debt). I like these definitions of Technical debt (from Construx) : 

The first kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred unintentionally. For example, a design approach just turns out to be error-prone or a junior programmer just writes bad code. This technical debt is the non-strategic result of doing a poor job. In some cases, this kind of debt can be incurred unknowingly, for example, your company might acquire a company that has accumulated significant technical debt that you don't identify until after the acquisition. Sometimes, ironically, this debt can be created when a team stumbles in its efforts to rewrite a debt-laden platform and inadvertently creates more debt. We'll call this general category of debt Type I.

The second kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred intentionally. This commonly occurs when an organization makes a conscious decision to optimize for the present rather than for the future. "If we don't get this release done on time, there won't be a next release" is a common refrain—and often a compelling one. This leads to decisions like, "We don't have time to reconcile these two databases, so we'll write some glue code that keeps them synchronized for now and reconcile them after we ship." Or "We have some code written by a contractor that doesn't follow our coding standards; we'll clean that up later." Or "We didn't have time to write all the unit tests for the code we wrote the last 2 months of the project. We'll right those tests after the release." (We'll call this Type II.)

to quote Martin Fowler (Fowler TechDebt) "The all too common problem is that development organizations let their debt get out of control and spend most of their future development effort paying crippling interest payments." Leading to the Red Queen effect: running to stay in place or falling slowly behind. 

But there is a third cause of technical debt, process debt.

Process debt occurs when an organization is so process laden that they are unable to develop or deploy a software system that has any hope of being current or of meeting current needs. Many larger Defense systems fit this mold: the shear mind-numbing process of how to create these systems from design to RFP to contract award virtually ensues that the system when and if its completed is Legacy. 

the fix to military acqusitions will be painful, not quite sure when the healing will start 

Does your Fed, State, Local CIO/CTO know how to code?

I think we've reached the point where we can no longer have federal, defense, state or local Chief Information Officiers much less Chief Technology Officers who can't develop, inspect, compile, deploy or run modern software and source code from scratch. 

And I don't mean they did it a while ago on punch cards or remember how bad Fortan was. No we need CIOs and CTOs who can standup a VM, a server, create a cloud and even run DevOps. 

They don't need to be crazy in depth coders, but they have to still be playing around with code and even better have commits or bug reports on some open source projects. I just think with how fast technologies are moving a CIO/CTO has to have one foot planted firmly in tech land and the other in policy or the other core part of the business so that they can call BS on tech when they see it. This would probably mean moving younger folk into these positions, which isn't a bad thing. 

SEE: JFDI as an example of folks I'm talking about

Agree, disagree? why?

If we don’t want to be like the Iranians and get Stuxnetted, take these 4 steps

Thanks to Tom Ricks for allowing me to post on his blog a short piece:

If we don’t want to be like the Iranians and get Stuxnetted, take these 4 steps

It's Wednesday, and that means another story about the looming threat of cyberattack, how vulnerable the United States and its infrastructure is, how bad the Chinese are, how to retaliate, etc. But what seems to be left out of the discussion is what can practically be done about it (beyond scolding bad people). 

The first thing that should be done is to shrink surface area for attack. What does this mean? Right now the U.S. government and industry runs a pretty homogenous set of operating systems and applications that have shown to be a big part of the problem; specifically, Microsoft and Adobe are two companies whose wares have become amazing attack vectors. Why? For a few reasons: 1) if you want to create a virus/exploit weapon you tailor one for largest adoption, 2) attack large morphing code bases that give rise to known-unknown software vulnerabilities, and 3) updates don't always filter out in time once new vulnerabilities are detected and patched.

A great example is how Stuxnet is reported to have entered the Iranian nuclear program: 

The main (and initial) infection vector is the transmission of the Stuxnet malware via USB devices: if an infected USB device is inserted into a clean PC and later accessed with the Windows Explorer, then the infection of that PC is triggered. This is due to either a malicious ‘Autorun.inf' file present on the USB device (for the oldest variants of Stuxnet) or to the usage of the ‘LNK' Windows vulnerability (MS10-046,CERT-IST/AV-2010.313 advisory) for the variants found in June 2010.

The Iranians were probably running older versions of Microsoft operating system software that wasn't updated (and was probably pirated to boot). Further, the Iranians were a victim of Microsoft's business model of stitching together source code to lock-in users and conversely lock-out other software, which allowed the virus carte blanche access to anything. 

So what should we, the government, or private companies for that matter, do? First thing, we've got to get our own house in order to limit our vulnerabilities (or "know thyself," to paraphrase Sun Tzu).

• First, get rid of software for which we have to continually make excuses. Just as the U.S. military doesn't promote smugglers (Han Solo) and farm boys (Luke Skywalker) to general, stop deploying software that requires additional fixes and comes stitched together. Microsoft and Adobe might be less expensive software, but if it leaves a backdoor open, is it really "cheaper"?

• Second, only install operating systems and applications where the source code is available for widespread public inspection. Keeping source code secret increases its widespread vulnerability to exploitation when a defect is detected.

• Third, increase heterogeneity of operating systems and applications to create gaps so that a virus/exploit can't transverse between different systems.

• Fourth, fund research into more secure operating systems and make the fruits of that investment public: A rising tide lifts all (security) boats. A small investment in maturing source code can have a large impact. 

 

 

 

my WSJ OpEd: Arthur Herman & John Scott: Send in the Tech Reinforcements

first WSJ oped: 

By ARTHUR HERMAN 
AND JOHN SCOTT

Today's Pentagon is losing its most important battle, the one for its own future. The Defense Department's latest evaluation report on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter reveals how badly that fight is going, and why.

There have been many stories about the F-35 Lightning II's problems and delays, and its looming total price tag of $1 trillion, up from prior estimates of $331 billion and $177 billion before that. Still, the DOD's Jan. 14 report zeroes in on the key issue: software and information technology.

All five software "blocks"—systems to take the plane from testing to full production—that Lockheed Martin is contracted to develop for the Lightning II are behind schedule and over budget. The testing of software for producing F-35s won't get done until 2017. Any new glitches that are found will likely delay deployment even longer.

The fault, however, doesn't lie with Lockheed Martin, or even with the F-35.

The problem is how the Pentagon goes about acquiring the IT and software that modern weapons systems need. If this problem doesn't get fixed, any hope of building a 21st-century American military will be doomed.

The complexity of the software that the F-35 fighter needs is staggering, almost incomprehensible. It runs to almost 10 million lines of software source code. The man in charge of the F-35 program, Maj. Gen. Chris Bogdan, has been quoted as saying about thesoftware, "it scares the heck out of me"—because he knows in the world of high tech, complexity is the enemy of effectiveness.

Reuters/Lockheed Martin

The U.S. Marine Corps version of Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, F-35B test aircraft BF-2 flies with external weapons.

Yet that's the dilemma the Pentagon faces every day when it comes to IT and software.

For example, the Air Force's Oracle -based Expeditionary Combat Support System was supposed to be ready in October 2013. Having spent $1 billion already, it needed another $1 billion just to get to one-quarter functionality by 2020. ECCS was supposed to automate the Air Force's management of parts and equipment. This inherent complexity of the acquisitions process effectively killed ECCS and led to the rampant cost overruns that also killed the Navy's DDG1000 destroyer late last year.

The Pentagon acquires IT and software-based systems the way it buys aircraft carriers—as if they were physical items to be forged or welded or mass-produced. The standard procurement cycle is geared around multiyear milestones and intensive evaluation reviews that can take months or years.

The modern software development cycle, by contrast, moves in weeks, days and even hours—because software is a malleable digital item whose only limits are the human imagination.

In addition, the Pentagon relies on a bureaucratic review process that demands contractors anticipate and resolve problems in advance. Every software engineer, however, knows that's not possible or even desirable.

Modern software constantly evolves. Engineers know that repeated test cycles in small portions at a time work best. Designers can learn from mistakes and glitches embedded in initial and early versions, and they can learn as well from early users of these versions.

More important, designers can take advantage of technologies that are unknown today but emerge later on. Learning by trial and error doesn't work so well for aircraft carriers or Abrams tanks, but it is crucial for the development of effective software.

The DOD's current acquisition strategy hasn't caught up or caught on. By treating software as if it were a product instead of a process, our military services are shutting themselves off from the kind of cost-efficient innovation that rules in the commercial software and IT industries. Amazon, for example, can make over 30 changes a week to its portal, from adding simple code changes to new complex features, without a major glitch. Our service personnel know this only too well, when they see how their children's videogames work better and have more sophisticated apps than the electronic gear they have to use in the field—and at a fraction of the cost.

The Pentagon has tried to go around the problem by buying off-the-shelf software for some systems. But that only postpones the inevitable frustration when it comes time to design software that can integrate those commercial products into warfighting systems. This is what happened when the Air Force tried to create the Expeditionary Combat Support System, which ended up as a $2 billion boondoggle.

Instead, the Pentagon needs a modern software and IT acquisition process that's as flexible, agile and open-ended as software itself—one that's geared for Moore's Law (computing power doubles every 18 months) and Butter's Law (network capacity costs get halved every nine months) instead of Murphy's Law.

Until we do, expect more messes like the F-35 and DDG 1000—which we ultimately can't afford and our fighting men and women ultimately won't survive.

Mr. Herman is the author of "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War Two" (Random House, 2012). Mr. Scott is a senior system engineer for Radiant Blue Technologies and co-wrote "Open Technology Development: Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Military Software" (Department of Defense, 2011).

A version of this article appeared Feb. 12, 2013, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Send in the Tech Reinforcements.

 

Issa IT reform bill now w/ Open Source Sec 405.

very interesting langauge in the new IT Reform Bill, on open source software:

Sept 6, 2012, HR ___ Disscusion Draft 

SEC. 405. PROMOTION OF GOVERNMENT-WIDE SUPPORT FOR THE USE AND

DEVELOPMENT OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE.

(a) PURPOSE.—The purpose of this section is to promote the use and

collaborative development of open source software within the Federal government.

(b) STANDARDS AND GUIDELINES.—Section 11302(d) of title 40, United

States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following: “The standards and

guidelines shall include those necessary to enable effective adoption of open

source software.”

(c) GUIDANCE.—Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of

this Act, the Director, in consultation with the Chief Information Officers Council,

shall issue guidance for the use and collaborative development of open source

software within the Federal government.

(d) MATTERS COVERED.—In issuing guidance under subsection (c), the

Director shall include, at a minimum, the following:

(1) Guidance to clarify that the preference for commercial items in

section 3307 of title 41, United States Code, includes all open source

software that meets the definition of commercial item in section 103 of

title 40, United State Code, including all such software that is used for

non-Government purposes and is licensed to the public.

(2) Guidance regarding the conduct of market research to ensure

the inclusion of open source software.

(3) Guidance to establish a program to educate the acquisition

workforce by providing information to identify and counter

misconceptions about open source software and to keep such

information updated.

(4) Guidance to define Government-wide standards for security,

redistribution, indemnity, and copyright in the acquisition, use, release,

and collaborative development of open source software.

(5) Guidance for the establishment of a Government approval

process to qualify open source software for widespread Government

use, addressing issues such as security and redistribution rights.

(6) Guidance to establish standard service level agreements for

maintenance and support for open source software products widely

adopted by the Government, as well as the development of

Government-wide agreements that contain standard and widely

applicable contract provisions for ongoing maintenance and

development of open source software.

(7) Guidance on the role and use of the Federal Commodity

Information Technology Acquisition Center, established pursuant to

section 11501 of title 40, United States Code (as added by section 302),

for acquisition of open source software.

(e) REPORT TO CONGRESS.—Not later than 2 years after the issuance of the

guidance required by subsection (b), the Comptroller General of the United States

shall submit to the relevant congressional committees a report containing—

(1) an assessment of the effectiveness of the guidance;

(2) an identification of barriers to widespread use by the Federal

Government of open source software; and

(3) such legislative recommendations as the Comptroller General

considers appropriate to further the purposes of this section.

 

It's only your tax dollars

This is a little something I've posted to the Whitehouse.gov site, if you agree please sign up and sign the petition, it is your tax dollars. 

Maximize the public benefit of federal technology by sharing government-developed software under an open source license

Top Three Reasons to Mandate Open Sourcing of Custom Federal Software:

Openness: Open Sourcing ensures basic fairness and transparency by making software and related artifacts available to the citizens who provided funding, consistent with the President’s 2009 declaration that “Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.”

Economic Multiplier: Making Provides an economic stimulus by serving as the raw material that supports a competitive software development and services industry.

Supports the Federal “Shared First” Agenda: Maximizes value to the government by significantly increasing reuse and collaborative development between federal agencies and the private sector, consistent with the current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) “Shared First” initiative.

Link Here: Maximize the public benefit of federal technology by sharing government-developed software under an open source license.

 

Someone Doesn't like Accumulo

Someone doesn't like Accumulo. And by the looks of it they are very well versed in the language of open source software (OSS).

Back ground: Accumulo was recently released as OSS to the Apache foundation and has to do with securoty features using a cloud architecture. What was interesting is that NSA funded, created and released it to build a community around these features that they wanted. 

Let the guessing begin on who put this in...

Department of Defense use of National Security Agency
cloud computing database and intelligence community
cloud computing infrastructure and services (sec. 929)
The committee recommends a provision that would prohibit the
use of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Accumulo cloud computing database by other Department of Defense (DOD) components after September 30, 2013, unless the Chief Information Officer certifies that there are no viable commercial open source databases that have the security features of Accumulo, or that
Accumulo itself has become a successful open source database
project. The provision also would require that Department of Defense and intelligence community officials coordinate fully on the
use by DOD components of cloud computing infrastructure and
services offered by the intelligence community for purposes other
than intelligence analysis to ensure consistency with the DOD information technology efficiencies initiative, data center and server
consolidation plans, and cybersecurity plans and policies.
The committee applauds NSA’s decision to adopt open source architectures and software for most of its cloud computing development. However, the committee disagrees with NSA’s decision to develop its own cloud computing database—called Accumulo—rather
than adapt an open source version of the Google BigTable product.
The committee understands that NSA decided to build a government solution several years ago because the open source systems
lacked security features that NSA considers essential. In hindsight,
the committee believes it would have been smarter for NSA to have
worked with industry and the open source community to add NSA’s
security features to the open source database systems. Indeed, the
committee believes that NSA should pursue that course now.
The downside of using a government-unique database is that,
compared to open source products, there will be far fewer developers contributing to technology advances, and all of the applications, analytic tools, and functionality that the open source community and commercial industry are developing for cloud computing
will not be compatible or interoperable with the NSA database, depriving the government of valuable innovation. The committee believes it is very likely that the rapidly expanding and innovating
cloud computing industry will pass NSA by in a hurry, with lagging performance and higher costs. The consequences would not be
confined to NSA, since the Army intelligence community has already adopted the NSA cloud architecture, and NSA is strongly
urging the entire Department of Defense to do likewise. One of
NSA’s arguments is that the security features of Accumulo are essential for the cybersecurity of DOD as a whole.
NSA is making an effort to heal its divergence from the open
source community by proposing Accumulo as an open source project
under the Apache Foundation as a competitor to existing Apache
Foundation open source databases like HBase and Cassandra,
which are widely used and supported in industry.
The committee believes it is important to ensure that there are
options available if Accumulo does not in fact become a viable and
widely supported open source project. The committee is aware of
commercial interest in the cell-level data tagging security features
that NSA built into Accumulo. These features should be as useful
to industry clients who need to protect and control access to the
data resident in cloud facilities as they are to the intelligence community and DOD.
If Accumulo is successful, or if the commercial open source community produces nothing comparable to Accumulo’s security features, this provision would permit Accumulo to be used in DOD
outside of NSA. But if Accumulo is not an open source success, and
if industry follows NSA’s security lead, the Department should use
a commercial product. This provision would give NSA almost 2
years since it made the Accumulo open source proposal to Apache
to succeed. The deadline in this provision is also sufficiently distant
to enable DOD components and industry to plan accordingly.
Under the direction of the Director of National Intelligence, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and NSA are planning to provide
cloud infrastructure and software ‘‘as a service’’ to all of the intelligence community. As noted, NSA is offering a government implementation of open source standards. CIA is offering a competitively
awarded commercial solution. These cloud services would cover all
manner of computing needs and capabilities, not just intelligence
analysis. This provision is also intended to ensure that DOD components’ use of these cloud services is consistent with DOD information technology policies and plans. The committee notes that the
software services that the CIA may offer to DOD customers could
include analytic databases like HBase and Cassandra, and other
commercial open source products, potentially providing an alternative to Accumulo.

Open Compute Project 2nd meeting in New York, NY October 27th, 2011

Open Compute Project 2nd meeting in New York, NY October 27th, 2011

What is the Open Compute Project (OCP) - http://opencompute.org: Hacking Conventional Computing Infrastructure. Started by Facebook a little over a year ago with a pretty big goal: to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. We decided to honor our hacker roots and challenge convention by custom designing and building our software, servers and data centers from the ground up – and then share these technologies as they evolve.

Press Release: http://opencompute.org/2011/10/27/making-it-real-next-steps-for-the-open-compute-project/

Funders: Facebook, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Arista Networks, Rackspace

Result (so far): The result is a data center full of vanity free servers, which are 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers.

Goal: By releasing Open Compute Project technologies as open hardware, our goal is to develop servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects.

Agenda for Oct 27^th, 2011:

Keynotes / Presentations

Frank Frankovsky, FB Tech Director – What if Hardware Were Open

1. Pace of innovation would increase
2. Less environmental impacts (less material and power)
3. Increased efficiency at scale

What is needed?

-       intellectual property structure, contributions, enablement

-       missions and principles

-       Facebooks new Oregon data facility (total cost ~$700 billion) savings: CAPEX of 24%, OPEX of 37%

Structure of OCP and what does it take to contribute

-       Download OCP contributor agreement, sign it and fax back

Board of Directors: Andy Bechtolshein (Arista Networks), Don Duet (Goldmacn Sachs), Frank Frankovsky (Facebook), Jason Waxman (Intel), Mark Roenigk (Rackspace)

The rack is becoming the chassis

“innovate more, differentiate less”

OCP has been focused on “greenfields” of new data centers, future need to focus on transition data centers from closed designs to OCP ones.

Andy Bechtelshein, Arista Networks

Innovation is our friend, gratuitous differentiation the enemy

OCP is:

-       not standards

-       not customer panel (look to Open Data Center Alliance for that)

-       not marketing organization

OCP focus is on open standards and open specifications

Focus on large scale problems

Designs data centers as a system (optimized as a system versus individual piece parts)

James Hamilton, VP Amazon Web Services

Blog here: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/18/overalldatacentercosts.aspx 

  

WE need warehouse scale computing on demand

OCP can increase the pace of innovation in data center technology

Data centers have innovated more in the last 5 years than 15

Amazon has dropped its AWS price 11 times in the last 4 years

Need to think and act at SCALE!

Any workload than can be run at marginal costs of power on a server is a good deal. Because the server is a sunk cost, must try to use every server as much as possible at cost of electricity.

Brian Stephens, VO/CTO RedHat

Redhat has certified OCP server stacks for use by RHEL

Intel, Jason Waxman, GM High Density Computing

Intel has made open source hardware its motherboard spec’s

Dell, Jimmy Pike, Chief Architect & Tech.

 OCP + open data center alliance + Openstack = where Dell plays

Technical workshops (I only attend one, below)

• Storage: Building for the 100-year standard.
• Open Rack: Mechanical design and modular power distribution.
• The Adjacent Possible: Virtual IO.
• Datacenter Design: Building for different geographies.
• Systems Management: Defining open systems management for the enterprise.

The systems management technical track is basing itself on the Apache Incubator process.

Overview & Mission Statement: Data Center Systems Management is focused on:

Hardware Management:

-       Platform Management

• Provisioning
• Configuration
• Orchestration
• Telemetry

-       Hardware Management

• Firmware lifecycle
  • Elements of payloads on machines
  • Fault alerting
  • Remote access

-       Hardware

• Motherbaords
• Chassis
• Cabinets
• Data centers

-       Strategic / Forward Looking

Problems to solve:

-       in-band/out-of-band

-       eliminate the data center “clown car” of carts with many CDs for upgrading firmware

-       Stop/limit scripting madness

-       Standards and options to look at:

• DMTF – Smbios
• Intel – DCMI, IPMI, IPMB, ICMB
• AMD – OPMA
• SAforum – DFMS, WSDM
• SMIF – SMBUS (org Intel), PMBUS
• PICMG – ACTG (IPMI, IPMB/ICMP mgmt)

Subtrack: Firmware Lifecycle

-       common lifecycle to providing motherboard bios/firmware configuration, deployment, updating and auditing (WS-man, XML)

-       common configuration, deployment, updating and auditing of RAID controller, MC and other firmware

-       management framework / API for providing common service

-       scalable to 100K + servers

Look at HPM .1 specification

Subtrack: Fault Altering

-       define consistent alert # and associated event information, i.e., 404 can mean different things for different bios

• maybe SNMP for ‘base’ functions & WS-Man for ‘extended’

-       for SNMP having a standard (OCP MAB) would define this message?

Subtrack: Remote Management

-       2 levels of remote machines access

• Base: power on/off
• Extended

-       Standardize method to access capabilities

-       Discover a machine hardware/firmware configuration could be written & queried in a standard way (WS-man)

Subtrack: Strategic / Forward Looking

-       how to operate at SCALE

-       12c-bus, SMBUS

-       Consolidated hardware management practices

Notes from the CERN Open Hardware Workshop

Notes from the CERN Open Hardware Workshop

http://www.ohwr.org/projects/ohr-meta/wiki/OHWorkshop

The workshop was held during the Sunday preceding ICALEPCS 2011, i.e. 9 October 2011 in Grenoble, France.

Session 1: Introduction and legal framework. This was an opportunity to define exactly what we mean by OH and discuss the latest developments on the legal side, such as the CERN Open Hardware License.

• Open Hardware: what, why, how, when, who (Javier Serrano, video CC BY-SA). This presentation will introduce the concept of Open Source Hardware (OSHW) and gave a summary of current efforts in the OSHW world. Introduced legal and commercial issues, as well as considerations on how to improve collaboration on hardware design among labs, universities and companies.

/

ppt here: http://www.ohwr.org/attachments/824/javier.pdf

see http://freedomdefined.org/oshw for software freedoms translated into the hardware domain

Reasons for OSHW:

for designers:

-        avoid duplication

-        get peer review/help

-        spend time tackling more ambitious problems

for companies:

-        peer review

-        compensate weak areas in a company with external help

-        build hybrid solutions

for clients:

-        no vendor lock-in

-        easier management of obsolescence

how to:

-        put your staff online, e.g., CERN open hardware repo

-        use OSHW definition

-        deal properly with liability

use FOSS tools for development

Find a good community model  

/

• Summary of the Open Hardware Summit (Tomasz Wlostowski, video CC BY-SA). A quick summary of the Open Hardware Summit, held on September 15th in New York City.

/

Open hardware superstar was Arduino + Arduino deploying ARM chips

Good talks by instructables.com (recently bought by AutoCad) and ifixit.com

Session on OH and the law

Ohanda.org is creating a sort of licensed hardware meta directory

Legal threats against OH were also discussed: DMCA, etc.

Protei: a project to create an autonomous sailboat to clean oil spills

Fukushima earthquake: an OH project was quickly created in a week for how to build your own gieger counter

Eyewriter: OH project to enable people with ALS the ability to use a computer

Amanda Wozniak: great session on open sourcing the engineering process  

/

• Open Hardware Licensing (Myriam Ayass, video CC BY-SA). The CERN Open Hardware Licence v.1.1 was released on July 7 2011. The purpose of this presentation is to provide some background information as to the context in which it was developed, the reasons and rationale for developing it and expected outcomes. A description of the main provisions will be given together with the main issues and solutions that were discussed during the process. Furthermore, thanks to the feedback received from the community, plans for v.1.2 of the license will be presented.

/

Ms. Ayass is part of the CERN Knowledge Transfer Group

Options for legal OH legal framework:

-        use current open source licenses? No

-        use creative commons (CC) license? No

-        use other open hardware license? No

CERN needed/wanted to track the spread of their hardware work, hence the reason behind the “inform licensor” section in the license

so they created the CERN OHL to partially meet this need

the next version 1.2 waters down the “inform” section

how does the TAPR OHL compare with CERN?

-        TAPR was drafted with specific jurisdiction – US

-         Core concept: reciprocal immunity from patent suits

-        distribution of documentation with product sold

-        in-kind request to notify licensor when product manufactured and sold

http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cernoh

/

• Arduino (David Cuartielles, video CC BY-SA). Arduino is an open source hardware platform created in 2005. The platform itself is made of circuit boards, a software development environment, a website to gather documentation about projects, and a series of tools to empower a community of users.

/

Arduino is a non-profit and receives license fees from its design for operating funds. Only about 10 people work at Arduino.

There was an open source hardware workshop about Arduino in Madrid, Spain (in Spanish, so not many English speakers heard about it). 600 people in attendance

Arduino gets about 45 (?) mil hits a month

2011 August 1 million units cumulatively sold, next expect 2 million

How open is Arduino:

1. Software IDE is GPL (inherited)
2. Core is GPL (inherited)
3. Hardware/blueprints are CC 3.0 SA (creative commons version 3.0 share alike)
4. Documentation is CC 3.0 SA

He told an interesting story about how Google-Android copied and modified one of the Arduino designs for the IO board and then Arduino in 40 hours replicated and posted the design as OH.

Business Model: keep a new design closed/secret before release and cut deals with manufacturers, then publish version 1.0 of the circuit board because almost immediately clones will begin to show up. The go after manufacturers who use the Arduino name brand without license. Clones come out quickly – 3 weeks in some cases.

/

Session 2: Business models. It is very interesting to discuss the role(s) of companies and how they can make business under an open paradigm.

• Open Hardware in Creotech (Grzegorz Kasprowicz, video CC BY-SA). Creotech is a company set up by former CERN and other scientific laboratories workers. Its mission is to create innovative, ready-to-implement solutions of electronics and electromechanics. We specialize in digital cameras (including solutions for astronomy), multichannel measurement systems (e.g. for ITER and JET), acquisitions cards (designed for CERN), systems of data transmission and special power supplies (e.g. for GEM detectors).

/

Creotech builds detectors. As a result with more things going fully digital with software, having open source hardware and software makes its easier for their customers (primarily CERN) to track down bugs and anomalies in readouts.

Uses and gives back to the White Rabbit project: http://www.ohwr.org/projects/wr-cores

/

• Open Hardware perspectives in National Instruments (Ravi Marawar). National Instruments (NI) is a Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) system provider that combines heavily researched designs manufactured with state-of-the-art quality control processes and guaranteed long term lifecycle management. NI product designs are influenced by reliability and quality goals, calibration needs, safety certifications, environmental and security compliance requirements and longevity expectations.

/

It seems NI is being forced into OSS by its customers

Uses White Rabbit: http://www.ohwr.org/projects/wr-cores

/

• First experience in Seven Solutions (Eduardo Ros, video CC BY-SA). Seven Solutions is a technology based company (intensively engineering based company). The company offers services of design, technology consulting, custom electronics, embedded computing, etc. After launching its own hardware based products, Seven Solutions is aware of how the OHR paradigm can benefit SMEs in this field, by providing a shield of confidence (making SMEs dependable entities), facilitating the active participation in medium scale designs as part of an engineering community and making easier the process of how an SME offers its services as add-ons on projects conjointly run by different institutions. Furthermore, OHR allows development cost sharing among different institutions since Intellectual property does not create borders between participating companies.

/

Motto: learn fast or die

They use and publish open hardware designs for press and to let people know what they do

The might publish their FPGA high performance processing platform

The stated that its helpful to have a “tractor” Agency/company pulling open hardware along to:

-        Start and funs projects

-        Give credibility to

-        Provide other customer access to

/

• Clear roadmap for Open HW in Instrumentation Technologies (Borut Repič, video CC BY-SA). Instrumentation Technologies has been addressing Open HW for quite a while even though it has not been called so officially. Apart from the main line of its top-end products, forming the base of knowledge, experience and practices it launched a separate line under the umbrella of so called "Working together". Thus, the result of a development project may be a "classical", Libera–type product or it may be a totally independent project resulting in a solution completely tailored to customer needs

/

www.i-tech.si

/

• The Facebook Open Compute Project (John Kenevey). Facebook's Open Compute Project is a nascent community which is actively seeking participants who are passionate about making strong technical contributions to defining and delivering the most efficient server, storage and data center designs. One of the enablers of said community is to ensure they have the necessary tools to provide open electrical and mechanical designs to the Open Compute Project.

/

http://opencompute.org/

Facebook is in the process of releasing software and hardware designs for its server centers. The official kick-off is October 27^th, more data coming out soon.

/

Session 3: Tools. Most of our tools are not open themselves yet. Here we discuss about what is the current offer and possible future plans. This affects mainly HDL simulation and PCB design.

• gEDA (Larry Doolittle, video CC BY-SA). gEDA is an umbrella term for a collection of Free Software EDA tools that share the philosophy of modular, flexible software that has proven so powerful in the Unix software world. Conventional modules like schematic capture and PCB layout interact with each other, and with other gEDA tools such as simulators and footprint generators, and also with proprietary tools through documented human-readable file formats and easy scripting. gEDA is also home to gerbv (Gerber viewer), icarus (Verilog compiler and simulator), and gtkwave (waveform viewer). While flexibility of these tools is their strength, this talk will provide a concrete example of how they can tie together for a single design. It will also demonstrate the user interface of the graphical tools, which has been slowly refined since 1998 (gschem) and 1994 (PCB).

/

Larry Doolittle, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

http://www.gpleda.org/, What is gEDA?

The gEDA project has produced and continues working on a full GPL'd suite and toolkit of Electronic Design Automation tools. These tools are used for electrical circuit design, schematic capture, simulation, prototyping, and production. Currently, the gEDA project offers a mature suite of free software applications for electronics design, including schematic capture, attribute management, bill of materials (BOM) generation, netlisting into over 20 netlist formats, analog and digital simulation, and printed circuit board (PCB) layout.

The gEDA project was started because of the lack of free EDA tools for POSIX systems with the primary purpose of advancing the state of free hardware or open source hardware. The suite is mainly being developed on the GNU/Linux platform with some development effort going into making sure the tools run on other platforms as well.

/

• Kicad (Dick Hollenbeck, video CC BY-SA). KiCad is a an open source software tool suite for the design of printed circuit boards. It includes internationalized tools for hierarchical schematics, board layout, component assignments, gerber generation and viewing, and a calculator for board signal integrity. A quick and simple overview is given of the schematic and layout tools using sample datafiles from a working 6 layer ARM9 board. Discussed are source code quality, rate of advancement, datafile formats, project philosophies and major contributors, as these are predictors of KiCad's viability as a foundation on which to embody open source hardware designs for the OHW community.

/

Very mature printed circuit board (PCB) layout OSS tool

http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/

http://kicad.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page

User interface is in 20 different languages + user manuals

May 2007: 3 people 75% of commits

-        lead developer is Jean-Pierre Charras, 40 years of experience

-        Wayne Stanbaugh

-        Dick Hollenbeck

Uses a DCVS – Bazaar

Project coding standards do exist

Code quality is very good, this helps to involve more people, more easily

Is looking to move to S-expressions instead of XML because in XML designs can be enormous: the language is called SWEET (http://sweet.xtronics.com/main.html). SWEET is a declarative schematic part language description language based on s-expressions.

SWEET is peer-to-peer and able to operate from within the interent

Wheeler on SWEET: http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2006/06/17/ , http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html

/

• What's missing in current FOSS PCB design tools (Tomasz Wlostowski, video CC BY-SA). An assessment of missing features in current FOSS PCB design tools as discussed in the foss-pcb mailing list, along with some plans to palliate these shortcomings.

/

a big need is a web-based distributed library model

email list here: [email protected]

/

• Makefile-driven HDL flow (Pawel Szostek, video CC BY-SA). Maintaining HDL is a source of many problems, not necessarily related to design issues. When developers want to perform a synthesis, they have to struggle through massive clicking job in an IDE and face compatibility problems among different versions of the same tool. What is more, synthesis of big projects is a time and resource-consuming process that makes the edit-compile-test cycle unreasonably long and makes it harder to introduce trivial modification to the hardware. When simulating VHDL models developers usually have to set correct compilation order. Hdlmake is a kind of swiss-army knife that tries to solve mentioned problems by generating a multi-purpose makefile. Hdlmake automatically detects file dependencies, generates IDE-specific project files, facilitates remote synthesis. It also offers a solution that makes modularization and managing of a project easier.

/

hdlmake – stored in OWWR and python

can make files for:

-        simulation

-        sythesis

/

• Icarus Verilog/VHDL (Pawel Szostek, video CC BY-SA). In the era of open source many companies and institutes are in the process of streamlining their hardware design flow to adopt open software development tools which will facilitate collaboration with external actors. We aim to build an open source tool that would allow developers to simulate and to share easily their designs, even if they cannot afford buying a powerful but expensive commercial piece of software. To achieve our goal we picked Icarus Verilog which is one of the most popular Verilog simulation tools. It is now being extended by a group of programmers who are concentrating their efforts on implementing support for SystemVerilog and synthesizable part of the VHDL. The final version of Icarus should allow people to simulate their mixed-language models along with testbenches written in Verilog or SystemVerilog.

/

-        co-existance of VHDL, Verilog, Systems Verilog

-        VHDL not suitable for complex TB

-        No operating systems for language simulation

-        Collaboration between Europe/US is tough

-        Commercial systems are expensive

-        http://verilog.wikia.org

/

• How to design logic synthesis and place&route tools (Sébastien Bourdeauducq, video CC BY-SA). While many researchers and engineers agree that several obstacles stem from the proprietary tools of the FPGA vendors, writing an alternative from scratch has always been perceived to be far too complex of a task. This perception comes largely from the lack of generic knowledge about the internals of a synthesis and place-and-route tool and the absence of published details regarding particular FPGA architectures and bitstream formats. In order to encourage the development of alternative tools, we will attempt to shed some light on these concepts and give hints about how the Xilinx Spartan-6 architecture and bitstream format work and how they could be fully understood.

Session 4: Ongoing projects in labs and institutes. A selection of current projects illustrating OH practice.

/

How to build an OSS FPGA toolchain

http://eeeg.toronto.edu/vtr

http://milkymist.org/fpgatools

/

• CERN OH developments (Erik van der Bij, video CC BY-SA). CERN has been practicing OSHW for more than two years now. The talk outlines some of the technical choices and discusses the current state of developments, both technically and in terms of collaboration with companies and other labs. The advantages of OSHW will be illustrated with concrete examples.
• OH developments in Soleil (Pascale Betinelli, video CC BY-SA). The Synchrotron SOLEIL is a third-generation light source located near Paris. The facility receives each year more than 2500 international scientific users. SOLEIL covers fundamental research needs in physics, chemistry, material sciences, life sciences, earth sciences… In applied research, SOLEIL is involved in very different fields such as pharmacy, medicine, chemistry, petrochemistry, environment, nuclear energy, as well as nanotechnologies, micromechanics and microelectronics, and more. Many other synchrotrons are present all around the world with similar or complementary performance. Today the synchrotron community encourages collaboration and sharing of development between synchrotron facility and at the same time competition. Other synchrotron facilities are interested in some of our hardware developments and because we can share this development with them, it is evident for us (the technical team) to join the open hardware initiative. But some conditions have to be taken into account, requiring stages in the process. After a short presentation of Soleil, I will explain our mission, our organization, what we want to share and our difficulties to convince people of the interest of this initiative.
• The Rhino Project (Brandon Hamilton, video CC BY-SA). The RHINO Project is an Open Source effort born out of the radar remote sensing group at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and motivated by CASPER and the SKA Africa project. Rhino, which stands for Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for computiNg and radiO, consists of a hardware platform that includes an ARM running Borph Linux, a Spartan 6 FPGA, DDR3 memory, dual FMC-LPC as well as numerous standard IO interfaces. The goal of the project is to provide a hardware platform and software tool-chain for Software Defined Radio (SDR) which is both easy to use, easy to learn and affordable to a broad audience. It is hoped that this effort will consolidate and enhance the teaching and research resources available for Software Defined Radio (SDR), nationally and among the hacker community. This talk will provide an overview of the hardware and software that make up the Rhino ecosystem, along with some current and future applications that show the potential of the platform.

/

Target is software defined radios and applications

Uses:

-        CASPER software out of Berkeley

-        BORPH – Berkeley Operating System for Reprogrammable Hardware: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2007/EECS-2007-92.html

/

• Open Discussion/Closing