[TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference]

[TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference]

[Norman Wilson]

Arnold: 

  But for several years now I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the
  research nature of most of the articles. Very few of them are actually
  useful (or even interesting) to me in a day-to-day sense.

===

I guess it depends on your interests, and also on what you look at.

I've got way behind in reading ;login:, but have been regularly
attending conferences: the Annual Technical Conference (ATC) and
some workshops (HotStorage, HotCloud) that are usually co-located;
LISA.  I still find plenty to interest me, both in talks and in
the hallway tracks, though LISA has been drying up over the years
(and it's clear that USENIX know that too and are working on
whether it should just be subsumed into the already-burgeoning
SREcons).

As I say, interests differ, but I've learned plenty of new things
about OS and networking design and implementation tradeoffs,
security at many levels, file systems, and storage devices.

Thanks to COVID, USENIX-sponsored conferences have all been
online for the past year and are expected to stay so through
the end of 2021.  For obvious reasons that greatly reduces
the expenses of the conferences, so the registration fees are
about 10% of normal.  Thanks to that, I've been able to sample
conferences I've never had time or money to travel to, like Security
and FAST (file systems and storage).  It's been well worth my
time and money even though the money comes out of my own pocket.

UNIX history is not part of the mainstream USENIX world these
days, alas--I was disappointed that there was no official 50th-
birthday party two years ago in Seattle (though the not-officially-
sponsored one at LCM organized by Clem and others was a fine time,
and USENIX had no objection to hosting announcements of it).
I should point out that the only time I've met Our Esteemed
Leader and Listrunner in person was at a USENIX conference, where
he held a session to show off his reconstructed very-early PDP-11
UNIX from the tape Dennis found under the floor of the UNIX Room.

I too would like to see the organization harbour some less-formal
meetings or publications.  The way to make that happen would
be to run for the Board and to actively sponsor such stuff (with
care about who is selected for the real work to avoid the problems
Ted describes).  Maybe that's a good idea, or maybe it's better
to let the Linux and BSD worlds do their own thing.  Either way
I think what USENIX does is worth while.  I've been a member for
40 years this year, and although it's not the same organization
as it was in the early 1980s, neither is it the same world it
lives in.  I still think they do worth while work and I am proud
to continue to support them, even though I'm not a published
academic researcher, just an old-style systems hack and sysadmin
from the ancient days when those were inseparable.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

Re: [TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference]

[arnold]

norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) wrote:

> Arnold: 
>
>   But for several years now I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the
>   research nature of most of the articles. Very few of them are actually
>   useful (or even interesting) to me in a day-to-day sense.
>
> ===
>
> I guess it depends on your interests, and also on what you look at.

Yes, exactly. For me, Usenix provides little added value. I had
been debating leaving Usenix for several years already; the move
to soft copy ;login: clinched it for me. I'm not happy about it,
but I had to recognize my personal reality.

> Either way I think what USENIX does is worth while.

I agree. For example, I would not like to see Usenix disappear.
But I no longer am getting value for my membership dollars.

So, not a value judgement on Usenix as a whole, merely a statement
of my personal situation.

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference]

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2021, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:

> Yes, exactly. For me, Usenix provides little added value. I had been 
> debating leaving Usenix for several years already; the move to soft copy 
> ;login: clinched it for me. I'm not happy about it, but I had to 
> recognize my personal reality.

I was not a member of Usenix; I was just a founding member (and past 
President) of AUUG, which decided to dissolve after we had done our job 
i.e. bring Unix to Australia.

I used to enjoy reading the Usenix snippets in AUUGN, though.

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference]

[Warner Losh]

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On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 11:55 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Apr 2021, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > Yes, exactly. For me, Usenix provides little added value. I had been
> > debating leaving Usenix for several years already; the move to soft copy
> > ;login: clinched it for me. I'm not happy about it, but I had to
> > recognize my personal reality.
>
> I was not a member of Usenix; I was just a founding member (and past
> President) of AUUG, which decided to dissolve after we had done our job
> i.e. bring Unix to Australia.
>
> I used to enjoy reading the Usenix snippets in AUUGN, though.


For some time, those were the only widely available surviving snippets of
the early days of Usenix newsletters. Too bad copyright law severely
limited what was published after the first few times.

I've been quite impressed with the AUUGN having read almost all the early
issues. It's quite the travel log of Unix coming to Australia and
colonizing different niches.

Warner

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[TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Josh Good]

I read the news, and I could not believe it.

It's April 1st, ain't it?

But then, this looks like is dated March 31. So it could be for real.

Behold: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/ibm_redhat_xinuos/

The PDF also is dated March 31: https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/31/xinuos_complaint.pdf

It's hard to believe someone would go to the trouble of writing 57 pages of
legalese just to make a damn joke.

"
	Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the name
	UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing SCO's
	long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for
	alleged copyright and antitrust law violations.

	"First, IBM stole Xinuos' intellectual property and used that stolen
	property to build and sell a product to compete with Xinuos itself,"
	the US Virgin Islands-based software biz claims in its complaint
	[PDF]. "Second, stolen property in IBM's hand, IBM and Red Hat
	illegally agreed to divide the relevant market and use their growing
	market powers to victimize consumers, innovative competitors, and
	innovation itself."

	The complaint further contends that after the two companies
	conspired to divide the market, IBM then acquired Red Hat to
	solidify its position.

	SCO Group in 2003 made a similar intellectual property claim. It
	argued that SCO Group owned the rights to AT&T's Unix and UnixWare
	operating system source code, that Linux 2.4.x and 2.5.x were
	unauthorized derivatives of Unix, and that IBM violated its
	contractual obligations by distributing Linux code.

	That case dragged on for years, and drew a fair amount of attention
	when SCO Group said it would sue individual Linux users for
	infringement. Though SCO filed for bankruptcy in 2007 and some of
	the claims have been dismissed, its case against IBM remains
	unresolved.

	There was a status report filed on February 16, 2018, details
	remaining claims and counterclaims. And in May last year, Magistrate
	Judge Paul Warner was no longer assigned to oversee settlement
	discussions. But SCO Group v. IBM is still open.
"

Either way, some one if fooling us hard.

PS: OK, it seems it's for real: https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/

I need to check my stock of pop corn, then...

My take: it's obvious they want to be a nuisance so that IBM settles the
case, so they then can go back home with some fresh cash. I hope IBM goes
ballistic on them to the bitter end, and finally sends the zombie back to
its grave. But then, IBM now has its new RedHat business to protect, so it
can get interesting.

-- 
Josh Good

Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Warner Losh]

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The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and
Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux,
including FreeBSD from their cloud platform.

Their copyright claims look to be a bit different than the old SCO lawsuit.

Reading their complaint, it is somewhat different than the old suit...
FreeBSD is mentioned like 34 times too, since Xinuos based their products
based on it. And their product is locked out of the IBM/Redhat cloud
platform/ecosystem. The copyright stuff seems almost an afterthought...

Warner

On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:51 AM Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote:

> I read the news, and I could not believe it.
>
> It's April 1st, ain't it?
>
> But then, this looks like is dated March 31. So it could be for real.
>
> Behold: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/ibm_redhat_xinuos/
>
> The PDF also is dated March 31:
> https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/31/xinuos_complaint.pdf
>
> It's hard to believe someone would go to the trouble of writing 57 pages of
> legalese just to make a damn joke.
>
> "
>         Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the name
>         UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing SCO's
>         long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for
>         alleged copyright and antitrust law violations.
>
>         "First, IBM stole Xinuos' intellectual property and used that
> stolen
>         property to build and sell a product to compete with Xinuos
> itself,"
>         the US Virgin Islands-based software biz claims in its complaint
>         [PDF]. "Second, stolen property in IBM's hand, IBM and Red Hat
>         illegally agreed to divide the relevant market and use their
> growing
>         market powers to victimize consumers, innovative competitors, and
>         innovation itself."
>
>         The complaint further contends that after the two companies
>         conspired to divide the market, IBM then acquired Red Hat to
>         solidify its position.
>
>         SCO Group in 2003 made a similar intellectual property claim. It
>         argued that SCO Group owned the rights to AT&T's Unix and UnixWare
>         operating system source code, that Linux 2.4.x and 2.5.x were
>         unauthorized derivatives of Unix, and that IBM violated its
>         contractual obligations by distributing Linux code.
>
>         That case dragged on for years, and drew a fair amount of attention
>         when SCO Group said it would sue individual Linux users for
>         infringement. Though SCO filed for bankruptcy in 2007 and some of
>         the claims have been dismissed, its case against IBM remains
>         unresolved.
>
>         There was a status report filed on February 16, 2018, details
>         remaining claims and counterclaims. And in May last year,
> Magistrate
>         Judge Paul Warner was no longer assigned to oversee settlement
>         discussions. But SCO Group v. IBM is still open.
> "
>
> Either way, some one if fooling us hard.
>
> PS: OK, it seems it's for real:
> https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/
>
> I need to check my stock of pop corn, then...
>
> My take: it's obvious they want to be a nuisance so that IBM settles the
> case, so they then can go back home with some fresh cash. I hope IBM goes
> ballistic on them to the bitter end, and finally sends the zombie back to
> its grave. But then, IBM now has its new RedHat business to protect, so it
> can get interesting.
>
> --
> Josh Good
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Wesley Parish]

Which isn't how I remember things. From what I remember, Linux had the
impetus in the late nineties that FreeBSD didn't have - the *BSD were
still recovering from the AT&T case, which is why O'Reilly had to
issue a 4.4BSD-Lite Cd-ROM when I suspect, they would've preferred to
have issued a 4.4BSD complete disc. So from IBM's POV, they could
support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370
and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe
iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of
the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right?

At any rate, by the time IBM formally joined the Linux club, it was
already (unofficial) host to at least one unofficial port to one of
its historic mainframes, and official host to an officlal SkunkWorks
port to its then-current mainframes. Experience counts.

None of the *BSD had nearly as big a presence in the IBM world, and
none of the earlier IBM Unix ports, some 4.*BSD, as far as I can
remember, ever had the presence of Linux as both a platform and -
thanks to Caldera-later-aka-The Sco Group - as a cause.

I had hoped that Xinuos was an honest attempt to provide support for
remaining SCO sites, but it seems they've fallen to the Dark Side and
the Easy Buck again. Sic transit gloria mundi ...

Wesley Parish

On 4/2/21, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and
> Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux,
> including FreeBSD from their cloud platform.
>
> Their copyright claims look to be a bit different than the old SCO lawsuit.
>
> Reading their complaint, it is somewhat different than the old suit...
> FreeBSD is mentioned like 34 times too, since Xinuos based their products
> based on it. And their product is locked out of the IBM/Redhat cloud
> platform/ecosystem. The copyright stuff seems almost an afterthought...
>
> Warner
>
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:51 AM Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote:
>
>> I read the news, and I could not believe it.
>>
>> It's April 1st, ain't it?
>>
>> But then, this looks like is dated March 31. So it could be for real.
>>
>> Behold: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/ibm_redhat_xinuos/
>>
>> The PDF also is dated March 31:
>> https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/31/xinuos_complaint.pdf
>>
>> It's hard to believe someone would go to the trouble of writing 57 pages
>> of
>> legalese just to make a damn joke.
>>
>> "
>>         Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the
>> name
>>         UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing SCO's
>>         long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for
>>         alleged copyright and antitrust law violations.
>>
>>         "First, IBM stole Xinuos' intellectual property and used that
>> stolen
>>         property to build and sell a product to compete with Xinuos
>> itself,"
>>         the US Virgin Islands-based software biz claims in its complaint
>>         [PDF]. "Second, stolen property in IBM's hand, IBM and Red Hat
>>         illegally agreed to divide the relevant market and use their
>> growing
>>         market powers to victimize consumers, innovative competitors, and
>>         innovation itself."
>>
>>         The complaint further contends that after the two companies
>>         conspired to divide the market, IBM then acquired Red Hat to
>>         solidify its position.
>>
>>         SCO Group in 2003 made a similar intellectual property claim. It
>>         argued that SCO Group owned the rights to AT&T's Unix and
>> UnixWare
>>         operating system source code, that Linux 2.4.x and 2.5.x were
>>         unauthorized derivatives of Unix, and that IBM violated its
>>         contractual obligations by distributing Linux code.
>>
>>         That case dragged on for years, and drew a fair amount of
>> attention
>>         when SCO Group said it would sue individual Linux users for
>>         infringement. Though SCO filed for bankruptcy in 2007 and some of
>>         the claims have been dismissed, its case against IBM remains
>>         unresolved.
>>
>>         There was a status report filed on February 16, 2018, details
>>         remaining claims and counterclaims. And in May last year,
>> Magistrate
>>         Judge Paul Warner was no longer assigned to oversee settlement
>>         discussions. But SCO Group v. IBM is still open.
>> "
>>
>> Either way, some one if fooling us hard.
>>
>> PS: OK, it seems it's for real:
>> https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/
>>
>> I need to check my stock of pop corn, then...
>>
>> My take: it's obvious they want to be a nuisance so that IBM settles the
>> case, so they then can go back home with some fresh cash. I hope IBM goes
>> ballistic on them to the bitter end, and finally sends the zombie back to
>> its grave. But then, IBM now has its new RedHat business to protect, so
>> it
>> can get interesting.
>>
>> --
>> Josh Good
>>
>>
>

Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Adam Thornton]

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On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote:

> So from IBM's POV, they could
> support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370
> and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe
> iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of
> the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right?
>

 This is not how I remember it going down.

There was an external-to-IBM "Bigfoot" port to S/390 (not S/370) that IBM
was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of a
sudden there was an IBM port to S/390.  Clearly (well, *I* thought it was
clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced
their hand.  (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of
my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground).

I was the system administrator of the first publicly-accessible
Linux-on-S/390 machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s
I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM
to advise them how we thought they should proceed.  They seemed to take
much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very
crazy.  (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine
Associates.  They're still around.)

I also later managed the port of OpenSolaris to zSeries, which, if IBM had
bought Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different.
Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot
of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver.  Alas, IBM tightened the
screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer
from Oracle in its back pocket.

But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta in the
late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually went
by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a
development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your
so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in
hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not
offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing,
cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port
going."

So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, is all
I'm saying.  By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had its
reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a
jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned
out differently.

Adam

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Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Adam Thornton]

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Misremembered the year.  That conference was October 2000.  I just found
the bookbag I got as swag from it.

On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 7:46 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So from IBM's POV, they could
>> support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370
>> and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe
>> iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of
>> the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right?
>>
>
>  This is not how I remember it going down.
>
> There was an external-to-IBM "Bigfoot" port to S/390 (not S/370) that IBM
> was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of a
> sudden there was an IBM port to S/390.  Clearly (well, *I* thought it was
> clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced
> their hand.  (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of
> my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground).
>
> I was the system administrator of the first publicly-accessible
> Linux-on-S/390 machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s
> I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM
> to advise them how we thought they should proceed.  They seemed to take
> much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very
> crazy.  (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine
> Associates.  They're still around.)
>
> I also later managed the port of OpenSolaris to zSeries, which, if IBM had
> bought Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different.
> Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot
> of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver.  Alas, IBM tightened the
> screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer
> from Oracle in its back pocket.
>
> But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta in the
> late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually went
> by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a
> development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your
> so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in
> hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not
> offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing,
> cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port
> going."
>
> So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, is
> all I'm saying.  By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had
> its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a
> jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned
> out differently.
>
> Adam
>

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[TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM)

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2021-04-03T19:50:51-0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> > But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta
> > in the late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I
> > actually went by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you
> > guys up with a development virtual machine," and what I got was an
> > earful about "your so-called portability" from someone who was
> > clearly much more invested in hating Linux than in, you know,
> > saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not offering me cycles on a
> > super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing, cool, here's who
> > you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port going."
> >
> > So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux,
> > is all I'm saying.  By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which
> > already had its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't
> > staffed its booth with a jackass still trying to fight the Unix
> > Wars, that story might have turned out differently.
>
> Misremembered the year.  That conference was October 2000.  I just
> found the bookbag I got as swag from it.

I think you're remembering the Atlanta Linux Showcase.  I was at the
same event.  I also think I know exactly the person you're talking
about: Charles Hannum, with whom I had a similar experience on a
different topic.

Instead of insisting that I was stupid and wrong for using Linux instead
of (NetBSD) in his view, I was stupid and wrong for using software
licensed under the GNU GPL instead of the "BSD" license (which variant
of the latter is not, all these years later, a matter I recall coming
up).  I mention this so that Mr. Hannum's reputation on this list risks
no blackening among those who share his hostility to copyleft.  ;-)

ALS was a terrific experience and, for me, lived up to the praise I had
heard about it as a venue for getting engineers talking to each other.
Regrettably enough, the conference was acquired by a firm.  It was held
one final time the next year in Atlanta, officially rebranded the
"Annual Linux Showcase", and, as I recall, permanently mothballed
thereafter, with the dot-com bubble-burst as either a direct reason or
as an excuse.

I have seen other technical conferences over the years steadily morph
from a technical/engineering focus to an orientation around sales and
"strategy", or more bluntly--propaganda.  The emphasis is no longer on
technological improvement and evaluation (i.e., how to achieve and
measure "solutions"), but on promotion, rationalization, and boosterism.

I suppose that one of the reasons this happens is that good conferences
grow, and companies sending delegations find themselves with growing
expense bills for doing so.  Engineers are a cost center.  When they
come back from the event, they will almost never have anything to "show
for it".  At best they'll be excited about something they can
"integrate" or some new idea they can realize after months of
development time.  In other words, you _might_ have a competitive
advantage after spending _even more_ money.

By contrast, sales people can bring you orders you can book the day they
get back, or even before the conference is over, thanks to the magic
power of accrual accounting, a practice which persists even after the
glorious examples of Enron and other gigantic bankruptcies of the 2000s.

That's the demand side.  On the supply side, conferences have
governance; it takes people to solicit papers, book speakers, and put
talks on the schedule and into proceedings.  Conference sponsorship is a
neat way of closing the gap between demand and supply on the back end;
be a "gold" or "platinum" level sponsor and obtain influence, likely
through direct seating of representatives on the committees that perform
the foregoing organizational roles.  Note the entrenchment and
persistence of precious metals as metaphors for status; we would not
name the tiers after the decreasing scale of photolithographic
processes, for example.  Historically, it's been a lot easier to
motivate a guy with a checkbook in the C suite who drives a Lamborghini
Gallardo with the word "platinum" than "5 nm".

I'm too young to know--did USENIX follow the trajectory of reorienting
its focus from engineering and research to sales?  Why does it no longer
occupy the premier place it once did?

Regards,
Branden

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Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM)

[Clem Cole]

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Note: These are my opinions/experiences not necessarily those of the
association or my employer.   And, yes, I am a former BOD member as well as
ex-President of same, as are a number of folks on this list.

On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 1:30 AM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I'm too young to know--did USENIX follow the trajectory of reorienting
> its focus from engineering and research to sales?

Actually, quite the opposite, USENIX was getting more and more academic and
research-oriented and less 'trade show.'  The key is that USENIX and ALS
should have been an excellent match, unfortunately, some of the
personalities involved were at odds with each other.  IMO: it was more of a
crash of personalities/control issues - the details do not need to be
repeated or aired again. Note: I was on the BOD at that time and in fact on
the PC for that specific conference.  Ted may have been on the BOD at the
same time.





> Why does it no longer occupy the premier place it once did?
>
As they say on Quora, "*never ask a question based on a false premise*."
Sadly, this is  a false statement.

USENIX is extremely well respected in the systems research and security
community in particular.  And even during these Covid times has continued
to have some of the premier conferences on the same; al biet virtual (more
in a minute).    An issue during the time you are discussing, USENIX had
evolved into "two foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS
community and LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for
respected places to publish papers/develop their tenure files.

USENIX had moved from its earlier (anything goes) - pure practitioner
origins - which were also researchers, so at a meeting in a classroom at
NYU, you told people you had something to say and came and did it, to a
more structured (research) approach with program committees, submitted
papers, and vetting and a hotel.  Along the way, because it had both types
of people and these were the folks that influenced the buying
patterns, vendors started to show up to show off what they had.   At the
time of the ALS conference you mentioned, the things happening in the FOSS
community - was much more like the origins of USENIX.   What had for years
separated USENIX from IEEE/ACM was it was where the two foci were really a
single one, and thus had been together and actually considered what was
potential as well as practical.  In fact, USENIX was noted as the place
where some of the most influential papers of the time had shown (numerous
storage papers including Rusty's NFS and my EFS paper in the same session,
just about any important security papers, numerous other system papers -- I
could go a few pages here).

Part of the issue was ACM's SOSP was every 2 years and there was too much
good stuff going on in the system world (BTW - USENIX eventually created
OSDI on alternate years because ACM was just going to do it).     But
USENIX also published less formal papers.  In fact, one of my all-time
favorite practitioner papers is from another member of this list -- Tom
Lyon's "*All the Chips that Fit*" from the 1985 Summer USENIX [which if you
have never read, send me an email, offline and I'll send you a scanned PDF
-- note to Tom if you still have the original bits I bet USENIX would like
them]. I suspect that such a paper would never have been acceptable in any
of the IEEE or ACM conferences.   Also unlike ACM/IEEE (and frankly the
thing that happen at USENIX when I was President that I am most proud of)
is that they do not have a paywall.  Anything they published from the time
when all proceedings were electronic is available and slowly some of the
older papers are being scanned or reprinted from the source - as
needed/possible.  As much as possible, all of USENIX's papers
<https://www.usenix.org/publications/proceedings> are available to anyone
[which was a huge thing to do - as it cut down a lot of revenue for them --
a paywall for papers is one of the things other associations use].

A number of good things happened at the time you mentioned, as well as some
bad.  Knowing the parties involved both today and at that time, if today's
BOD and Executive Director was given the same choices that they had at the
time of the action, I suspect we might have had a different outcome. IMO to
the demise of FREENIX and ALS were two of the not-so-good choices that were
made, but I understand why those conferences did go away at that point in
history.   If it makes you feel any better, as a former PC Chair for a
couple of FREENIX (which was caught with the same bullet), and as I said a
member of the PC of ALS, I was very sad to see that happen and I personally
fought against it.  But, I was on the losing side of that argument.
Unfortunately, that ship sailed, and reviving them is unlikely to be
possible although I believe it has been discussed a number of times since I
left the BOD.

Back to your point, USENIX may have stopped being as important to many
practitioners, particularly ones in the FOSS community. Which I do find
sad, but I understand the issues on both sides and why that might be so.
For instance, Keith Packard of X11 fame, Steinhart,   and I were all
talking about "whence USENIX" at a Hackers conferences a few years back.
 So, if you come from that side of the world, you may not value membership
or the results (BTW: my own now hacker daughter,  who is a Googler, dropped
her membership last year as she felt it was of less value to her); but so
far USENIX has continued to be important to a large part of the research
community and a set of some practitioners.

That said, I also believe in 2021, that the USENIX BOD and their ED is
struggling with a financial model that works for them when they do not have
the conference revenue as they had before CV-19.  I hope for their sake,
the current treading water situation can find a way to bring them back to
what they were pre-CV-19 because the conferences they traditionally have
held, are excellent (premier in your words) and I would hate to see that
really go away because they have had a lot of value and so far have
continued to provide it.

Respectfully -- my 2 cents.

Clem

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Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM)

[John Cowan]

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On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:23 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:


> An issue during the time you are discussing, USENIX had evolved into "two
> foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS community and
> LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for respected
> places to publish papers/develop their tenure files.
>

I think this is a long and accelerating trend, and not just at
conferences.  There simply are no venues for "engineering" papers or
presentations any more, which doesn't bother me directly, but bothers me
very much indirectly, because I love engineering papers and have to read
academic papers, ummm, very selectively.  (In particular, anything labeled
"formal semantics" just gets skipped.)



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone,
unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose,
he saw only two aged hands withering in flame.   --"The Pyre of Denethor"

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[TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference]

[arnold]

This hits home with me very hard. I have been a Usenix member since the
around 1984. Almost 40 years.  I am finally letting my membership drop,
now that ";login:" is going soft-copy.

But for several years now I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the
research nature of most of the articles. Very few of them are actually
useful (or even interesting) to me in a day-to-day sense.

And this saddens me; I used to be proud to be a Usenix member; I no
longer feel like I get any added value. Especially as I live out of the
US, attending conferences is impossible. (The last annual conference I
went to was in 2004.)

Ah well. The only constant in the world is change.

Arnold

John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:23 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
> > An issue during the time you are discussing, USENIX had evolved into "two
> > foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS community and
> > LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for respected
> > places to publish papers/develop their tenure files.
> >
>
> I think this is a long and accelerating trend, and not just at
> conferences.  There simply are no venues for "engineering" papers or
> presentations any more, which doesn't bother me directly, but bothers me
> very much indirectly, because I love engineering papers and have to read
> academic papers, ummm, very selectively.  (In particular, anything labeled
> "formal semantics" just gets skipped.)
>
> John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
> And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone,
> unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose,
> he saw only two aged hands withering in flame.   --"The Pyre of Denethor"