My BOF at LinuxWorld was last night and I think it went pretty well.
About ten people showed up, which justifies that I wasn’t the only person who cared. The LinuxWorld organization doesn’t provide audiovisual equipment for BOFs, but the guys at Covalent lent me a projector so I was able to show my slides anyway. Thanks! Scott Herscher was there and talked a little bit about Howl. Apple’s Stuart Cheshire showed up and answered a lot of questions. He’s one of the main architects of the technology and works on Rendezvous for Apple. He brought a bunch of small devices that use the technology, including an Axis webcam that runs Linux and advertises a web page with the camera stream on it through Rendezvous. On a whim, we set up an iTunes music share by starting an ad-hoc wireless network, and the other iTunes playlist showed up in my iTunes on the big screen almost immediately. Note: no one configured any IP networking, I chose a wireless network name and the rest Just Worked.
Stuart posed the question why more Linux distributions don’t include Zeroconf Networking, and someone responded that there are license and patent implications. For instance, the zcip link-local IP autoconfigurator has been removed from Sourceforge because the author is afraid to get sued for patent violations. The effect of a move like this is that it turns a software project into a political statement, and stifles adoption of this technology in a quagmire of fear. This may be caused by the impression that Apple sues people willy-nilly, which I don’t think they do. Have the authors of zcip received a cease-and-desist notice? Or are they just messing? Fortunately, none of the attendees at the BOF were lawyers. Oh, and an alternative IPv4 Link-local autoconfigurator is available .
I hope this session has attracted some attention to this cool technology. Adopting it on Linux can help making the platform easier to use in a networking situation… network printing on Linux still needs to be way easier (right, Eric?) and Zeroconf can help.
