Posts tagged: OSCON

One of the major themes of this year’s OSCON is commercial adoption of open source technology. There are also many for-profit companies represented here whose businesses revolve around packaging, delivering, and supporting open source software. Now there’s another one:

On August 3rd, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit public benefit software development organization, launched a wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation…. One of our goals in establishing the Mozilla Corporation is to further promote the success of the Mozilla project and the Firefox and Thunderbird products, which then has the effect of strengthening the commercial ecosystem around the project and providing additional opportunities for Mozilla developers.

I sat in on most of DHH’s Ruby on Rails presentation this afternoon, and I have to say I’m in danger of catching the religion. Like a good cult leader, Hansson is energetic, intelligent, and unwavering in his faith that his is the right path. Within 30 minutes of the end of the session I had installed Rails via DarwinPorts, though my schedule hasn’t left me much time to play with it.

I have a hunch that the OSCON crowd has more than its share of people with nostalgia for classic arcade games. If that’s you, check out the list of classic video games and pinball machines at Ground Kontrol, “the Pacific Northwest’s best collection of arcade and home video game classics.” It’s just a stone’s throw from Powell’s Technical Books (who are offering a 20% discount with your conference badge, if you haven’t heard). And it’s cool – hell, they use a private wiki to keep track of work on the machines. Play some games, have a beer, and reconnect with the world of proprietary software. I’ll see you in the pinball loft.

According to their blog, the Open Source Intiative (OSI) is holding a public meeting at OSCON on Thursday July 3 at 7:30pm. I’ve been wondering what has transpired since they issued their statement on license proliferation back in April:

Interference between different open-source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem that OSI has become as a victim of its own earlier success… The day of the open-source license as tribal flag or corporate monument will have to come to a close.

In a couple days I leave for Portland, Oregon and the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. In the tutorial sessions I’ll be mainly on the Python track (including one session with Alex Martelli, uber tech lead at Google and author of Python In a Nutshell). I’ve heard good things about the conference, and the list of people who will be there is impressive. I’ll try to post regular reports here.