[NYCBSDCon] Talk idea Kernel netdump project / Contiki Another BSD Licensed OS

[Brian Callahan]

I don't mean to be the "bad guy" here, but I lean no on this - 
explanations inline.

On 9/18/2013 10:30 PM, Mark Saad wrote:
> All
>    I was talking to Ike and to Toothman, about an idea for a talk. Here
> is the short synopsis
>
> Contiki is a BSD licensed embedded OS that has nothing to do with
> Free/Net/Open other then the license. I said to Ike and Jim that it may
> be a good idea to see if we can get someone to talk about why contiki
> chose the BSD license,  what contiki has to offer the world and show off
> some of the cool things you can do with it. IE the Apple II port talking
> to a set of smart street lamps via IPv6 .
>

Don't get me wrong - I think it's really neat that there's a system like 
Contiki out there and it looks like they're doing really interesting 
things, but how does that fit into a day that's supposed to be a 
showcase for *BSD? This could be especially disastrous for an embedded 
con - would we really want to spend 5 of the 6 talks about all the 
progress and usefulness of *BSD in the embedded space and then a talk on 
some other system entirely? It would make us seem less confident in 
successfully implementing *BSD in the embedded space (despite the fact 
that Contiki runs on archs we never will).

The way I see it, is if that paragraph was s/contiki/linux/ or 
s/contiki/windows/ - would we even need to have this discussion? I think 
the same applies for contiki - even if it does use a BSD license.

Also, on a separate but not unrelated note, do we want the con to be a 
place to discuss proprietary vs GPL vs BSD (or, at least, why choose 
BSD)? I could be swayed either way on that.

> Why should NYC*BSDCon entertain a talk / presentation about another OS ?
> Well for starters There was some talk on the FreBSD Hackers mailing list
> about building a netdump setup for FreeBSD that was akin to the Apple
> OSX Netdump a/k/a kernel network dumps over the network.  The thread
> went so far as to say hrumm, we could use the contiki uIP stack to make
> this happen, yadda yadda yadda.
>
> So two talk topics that are sort of related
>
> 1. General Presentation on Contini , uIP,  6lopan, RIME

I don't think this talk has a place at the con, for above reasons. We 
will have plenty of topics lined up, no?

> 2. General Talk on Netdump, its use of uIP , etc
>

I could be swayed on this, if FreeBSD(/others) got or were working on a 
working implementation. Otherwise I don't see the difference between 
talking about uIP and talking about, say, the FreeDOS stack.

> What do you all think, should this be researched and people contacted ?
>

My 2 cents - feel free to tell me that I'm wrong though.

~Brian