Posts tagged: OSCON

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!

If my scanty coverage of the 2005 O’Reilly Open Source Convention wasn’t enough for you, check out these excellent, thorough post-show wrapups from Andy Oram at O’Reilly and Slashdot (though I recommend setting your score threshold to 5 as always, in this case to boil down a “Ruby On Rails Doesn’t Scale” thrash).

The above were my two favorites from O’Reilly’s general OSCON wrapup page; it also includes links to Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, and Delicious tag searches if you want to read every last bit of prose posted about the convention. Also, you may find some of the presentation files interesting or useful, especially if you’re an attendee with spotty notes.

It’s possible that there’s still some guy doing laps around the Oregon Convention Center on a Segway with security chasing after him, but as of 1:30PM today OSCON 2005 was officially over.

This was my first time attending the conference, and I had a great time. I learned a lot, had some excellent discussions and unexpected laughs, and got myself fired up again about being part of the open source anti-massacree movement.

I have to admit that I carry big shield of skepticism when I circulate exhibit halls. Luckily a fellow attendee tipped me off to OpenLaszlo, an extremely spiffy system for server-side, declarative generation of Flash content. What this means for somebody like me – someone who, despite a lot of background in visual design, would really prefer to work directly with code – is that very sweet Flash-based interfaces can be constructed via XML. Their XML dialect, LZX, impressed me with its elegance and (for XML) relative lack of verbosity. The generation code is Java, which you can either run live on your server or run offline to generate standalone .swf files. They offer a nifty playground/demo for you to check it out.