OSCON 2006 - Thursday Keynotes
Here’s my weblog entry on some of the Thursday keynotes at OSCON 2006.
The Zen of Free
Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems
(Note that since giving his keynote, Mr. Phipps posted a weblog entry that includes a PDF of the text of his talk. What follows here is my spin on his talk.)
The keynote opened with a description of the many open source projects that Sun supports. Specifically included was Linux. However, since Sun produces Solaris (a competitor to Linux) it would be more accurate to say that “Sun is supporting Linux without actually supporting Linux.” Mr. Phipps used this koan-like statement as a segue to five koans which express the Zen of free software.
- Altruism Without Sacrifice
Open source developers know that keeping their work to themselves reduces the overall value of their work. - Licensing Without Lawyers
Free and open-source software has evolved to the point that we now have a library of appropriate licenses from which to choose. - Community Without Controlling
With open-source licensing effectively a done-deal, governance within a community becomes a far more important issue. The problem is that there are no codified “benchmarks” or reference designs for governance including the important issues of who has commit access to a project and who can make binding decisions. - Lock-in is Lock-Out
- Staying Because of the Freedom to Leave
(These two koans are closely related so I’ll lump them together.) Open source software is an important springboard to freedom; in particular, the freedom to stop using a particular software product is a key freedom. For example, if multiple software products all support a common data format, one has the freedom to try something new and/or different. The best way to scare off early adopters of a software product is to force them to use a proprietary data format. Just knowing that one can easily move from product to product is a great way of maintaining market share. Expanding on this, it is critical to have data formats that allow equal implementations on different operating systems, that the data format specifications be transparent (not handed down from a particular company), and that the standards be maintained by impartial stewarding organizations.
5 A Day
Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz
This was a highly entertaining talk that is all but impossible to adequately capture in a weblog entry. On the surface, he basically said that open source software is like a tomato. (Perhaps you had to be there…) The main take-away is that organizations should have the goal of one-third of their software use be open source. Said another way, organizations should use (at most) twice the amount of closed source as open source software. Note that even though the copyright notice for Windows XP mentions that portions of its code are derived from Berkeley Unix, you can’t count it as open source. 
Developers: You’ve Got the Power - Now What?
Stephen O’Grady, RedMonk (industry analyst)
(The speaker provides links to his presentation slides in his blog entry.)
In this keynote, the speaker noted that “in the beginning” CIOs of companies controlled the money which in turn meant that they had control over developers. With the advent of open source software, there has been a power shift from the closed source companies to the open source development communities. In the words of several noted figures (including Spiderman), with this shift in power comes a shift in responsibility and stewardship. The speaker then gave five admonitions to open source developers:
- educate, evangelize, and market (the concept of open source software)
- make open data a priority
- lower the barriers to entry (one good way is superb documentation)
- be creative (don’t try to play the same game as competing closed source solutions)
- work together
Making Tech Documentaries: How and Why
Jason Scott, Curator, TEXTFILES.COM
This was a rather interesting keynote in that it wasn’t really about technology. It was more about preserving the history of technological development. The speaker finished a documentary last summer on the history of bulletin board systems (BBSes) and is currently working on “Get Lamp”—a documentary of text adventure games. The talk revolved around the process of collecting the footage and concluded with the recommendation that people capture some history for posterity. In particular, he suggests capturing photographs of your workplace and saving interesting artifacts as well as committing to words some of what you remember about your personal history. I think this is a great idea and I plan to post entries describing the good-old days of computing from time to time.
