More from OSCON

My laptop has really gone from bad to worse, so blogging will be extremely light until I get home. The N800 has been filling in nicely. It’s a shame I have been unable to live blog the sessions, as they have been really interesting. I was able to take a few notes and will include them here:

More Than Licenses: The Legal Policy of the Free World in the Age of Web 2.0 Eben Moglen
* Choosing certain licenses will result in a more cohesive community.
* The GPL didn’t originally take into account the economic importance of community.
* We have built a good republic, not just good software.
* Freedom of speech includes the right to not talk..translated to code this is were the GPLv3 walks the line in regards to the “ASP loophole”.
* Regarding ODF: no commercial entity should have the ability to intermediate between a government and its people.

Who Gets to Decide What Open Source Means? Michael Tiemann, Brian Behlendorf, Danese Cooper, Chris DiBona, Ross Mayfield, John Roberts
* SugarCRM 5 will be GPLv3 and will be available in a couple weeks.
* Most people take the OSD as the final word on what defines Open Source, but some do not.
* Attribution is still a hotly debated topic. It gets especially hairy when you take into account logos and trademarks. It also gets interesting when you are talking about aggregating small bits of code from many projects that require attribution.
* The OSI has approved the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) from SocialText.
* Someone asked how far the OSI was willing to go to “defend” Open Source. Luckily it usually doesn’t go beyond a simple polite email.
* The question was asked whether as new licenses get approved whether some old ones will be retired. Hopefully.

Some random notes:

* Microsoft will be working to get multiple licenses approved by the OSI.
* You can carpet an entire floor in a parking garage and throw a party (Thanks Sun).
* Dtrace really is phenomenal

To be honest there has been so much interesting discussion that it’s hard to be able to blog it all. You really should consider attending OSCON. More later.

–jeremy