OSCON Updates

I had planned to post regular OSCON updates, but the network has been up and down, so here are some random musings. As with some conference posts of mine, this is a bit random stream of consciousness and is not edited/proofread.

Tuesday Evening Extravaganza
* Mark put it well when he said that Open Source is really looking for a “complimentary economic model”. The web took a while to sort out that advertising was the answer, and I’m confident we’ll find the right answer (or more likely, answers) as well. This means me need economic innovation nearly as much as we need innovation in other areas. He also brought up the free software syncronicity issue again. I’ve been meaning to post on this topic and will do so soon.
* r0ml once again exceeded expectations and is one of my favorite speakers – he even juggled this time. He not only compared rhetoric methodologies to software development methodologies, he did it with panache.

Wednesday
Tim O’Reilly
* 3 biggest challenges and opportunities – Cloud Computing, open programmable web and open mobile
* It’s clear that mobile Linux is going to be a hot topic for a while. Intel will be releasing Moblin soon. Which mobile Linux offering will prevail remains to be seen.
Aker and Monty
* Monty “thank god we didn’t go public” – would very likely have led to more closed source components!
* “6 months later, Sun is still trying to figure out what they bought”
* Tim asked whether Jonathon committing to Open Source so heavily has caused internal conflicts within Sun
Brian – certainly
* Tim asked how the support within Sun was for “internal projects” such as Maria and Drizzle. Answer: surprisingly well.
* Monty: “for the last few years, MySQL has been management driven and not developer driven. Sun is allowing us to go back to our roots”
* Monty: “we had become – submit a patch and it may make it in sometime in about 3 years. That was ridiculous”
* Tim: “Adobe is one of the last great proprietary software companies”

Identi.ca
* Identi.ca is really taking off. It’s even streaming in the OSCON lobby. Had a chance to chat with Evan about it for a little bit and he’s once again doing a fantastic job. Kudos.

Changing Education… Open Content, Open Hardware, Open Curricula
* This was an extremely interesting panel and a topic that really interests me. It will be something I plan to research more in the coming months,
See: Curriki, Literacy Bridge and The Cape Town Open Education Declaration

OSSL at Microsoft
* A good look at what happens behind the scenes at the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab – surprising how many people didn’t know this existed.

Off to a break now – more updates should hopefully come soon.

–jeremy