Posts tagged: OSCON

OSCON ends with a half-day that goes by all too quickly. Below are some notes from those final few hours.

Keynotes

Nat Torkington

During the Keynote segment Nat Torkington cracked everyone up with an omnidirectional roast he called Open Source Therapy. He described imaginary family therapy scenarios in which Mom and Pop are working out their problems with their various open-source-project kids. The only one I wrote down was about Python: “Mom and Pop wish Python would get drunk, get laid, and lighten the fuck up!”

I wasn’t able to get to OSCON this year, but this photo is definitely a winner in the category of impromptu geek performance art:

Ruby on Rael

Worth reading: Simon Willison’s “Things I learned at EuroOSCON.” Bits that I found alternately interesting or alarming:

• “SVK … lets you mirror from, branch and commit patches back to Subversion, CVS, Perforce and more”

• “If a worm locked your drive with a random password, it would be illegal under the DMCA to recover your files”

• “PHP 6 (out next year) will probably have namespaces”

• “The European broadcast flag proposals are even nastier than the US ones”

Last week I taught a class (eight times, in fact) which kicked off with a short presentation modeled after Dick Hardt’s OSCON talk on “identity 2.0”; I told my students that I had stolen the idea from one person (Hardt) who had stolen it from another (Lessig) and that they in turn should feel free to steal it should the need arise. The style is rapid, visually rich, and fun; watch Dick’s performance to get a feel for it.

ITConversations has posted two more audio recordings from OSCON; Kim Polese’s From DIY to DIT and, today, Jeremy Zawodny’s Open Source at Yahoo!.

The shows will continue to trickle in, but I’ll stop posting about them now that ITConversations has the OSCON 2005 series page linked from their main navigation bar. Enjoy!

ITConversations has posted a second talk from OSCON 2005, Asa Dotzler’s “Linux: In Search of the Desktop”. The talk grew out of a controversial blog posting Asa made, which was then slashdotted.

I agree with most of what he says. I shouldn’t be surprised at the number of people who disagreed with his basic assumption – that Linux has a place in the mainstream desktop computing world – but I am. This argument (“Linux should not try to accommodate regular people”) is, well, stupid. There will always be obscure distributions for people who enjoy being obscure. Or they can move to NetBSD or QNX or unpack their Amiga. I sympathize with the desire – I use Postfix instead of Sendmail, Python instead of Perl, Debian instead of Red Hat, MacOS instead of Windows, Camino instead of Firefox. But if the mainstream OS is Windows, and Windows sucks, then something else needs to move into that space – and devotion to being “alternative” means one is forever marginal by definition.

Recordings from this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention have started showing up over on the excellent ITConversations. First up is Nat Torkington and Tim O’Reilly speaking about O’Reilly Radar.

I’m looking forward to seeing more sessions appear in the coming weeks – especially the ones I didn’t get to!