It’s the last day of OSCON 2007, and I couldn’t be happier. Don’t get me wrong, I love coming to OSCON (even if I’ve only been twice now). It just starts so early in the morning. I’m looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow before I finally head back home.
Anyway, on to the keynotes.
First up is Philip Rosedale, of giant, flying penis fame. Um. I mean, Second Life fame. He’s here to talk about Open Source Second Life. He had an interesting comment comparing Second Life to the X Prize. We, as humans, have two major goals. First, we could delve into inner space, the virtual world that is Second Life. Second, we could venture into outer space, leaving the planet behind altogether. But really what he wants to talk about is how Open Source can benefit Second Life and, presumably, how Second Life can benefit Open Source. Philip sees Second Life as being good for humanity and wants to see it grow in the way that only the Open Source community can manage.
I’m not entirely sure how Second Life can be good for humanity (it’s just graphical IRC, isn’t it?) and I’ve never even considered using Second Life. On the surface, it looks like it could be fun. But it’s not a game. At least the MMORPGs had stuff to do. Second Life is just real people in an imaginary world, doing all the things that real people do to annoy me. We’ll see.
Next up is Jimmy Wales, of Wikia fame. He started off with a quote. “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” That is free, as in speech, of course. Wikipedia was the encyclopedia. Now, Wikia wants to be the entire library.
Of course, this being OSCON, Jimmy was sure to point out that all of this free information is thanks to Open Source. Today, there are so many inexpensive options out there to publish web sites, which I certainly don’t need to enumerate to my audience. Wikipedia, and now Wikia, take full advantage of this Open Source software.
So why not extend the idea of openness to search? Today, all of our searches are locked up in companies. From so-called good companies (Google) to so-called bad companies (Microsoft). But they are still companies. Search should be open and democratic, too. So that’s what Wikia is doing, building an open search.
There are four keys to open search: transparency, collaboration, quality, and privacy.
Now for the announcement. Wikia has acquired Grub (no, not the bootloader), a distributed web crawling program. Interesting. Another distributed software application. I like the idea behind these, using all the potential of all those idle processors, but I don’t much like paying the electric bill.
Our third keynote of the day is being delivered by Simon Wardley, who points out that he is from Kent, England. He’s here to talk about one of his passions—second only to ducks—commoditisation. There is an ever-driving force in IT to push products and services to being commodities. Companies try hard to push products and services away from being commodities, using patents and DRM. However, Open Source is a major driving force for turning products and services into commodities.
This is a concept I really like. Why should we spend all of our time reinventing wheels? If something has already been done right, why can’t we all take advantage of it? In fact, it was all the rage when I attended the Platform Grid Conference last year. However, aside from the academics speaking at that conference, everyone there represented a company that wanted to capture and jail your data.
There are three main levels of commoditization, software, framework, and hardware as a service ({S,F,H}aaS). By open sourcing each of these, we create a stack capable of deploying new and interesting products, without spending so much time reinventing those bloody wheels.
Our next speaker was none other than Nathan Torkington, our program chair. He will be giving us three keynotes in fifteen minutes, just to prove that fifteen minutes is more than enough time for a keynote.
Short keynote number one: Dr. Nat’s therapy session. It was very funny, but very difficult to blog. In short, he took a page out of Dr. Phil’s book and psychoanalyzed all the software we use on a daily basis. It’s hard to describe, but he nailed each of the projects’ idiosyncrasies quite well.
Short keynote number two: Open Source has won. Nat’s running low on time, so he’s talking really, really fast in his kiwi accent. Fortunately, isn’t as strong as other kiwi accents I’ve heard, but as he speaks faster, it gets stronger. So Open Source may have won (is winning?) the battle against proprietary software companies, but we spend a lot of time fighting amongst each other.
Short keynote number three: People are stupid (don’t even get me started). Apparently, all the smart people now work for Google, leaving the rest of the world with very few smart people. The message here, it’s easy to be mean, but hard to be nice. Remember, we’re all people. Be nice to each other.
Our final keynote is from James Larsson, someone who, as Nat tells us, embodies the hacker spirit. He’s here to tell us how to “Pimp My Garbage.” I’m actually a little scared to find out what that means.
Okay, this is a great talk. He’s showing off ways he has turned old, boring games into something a bit more exciting. Not only games, but old, discarded electronics. It’s all about taking old things and thinking of new, interesting things to do with them. It is the essence of hacking. I’m tempted to subscribe to Make magazine now.
Interestingly (or perhaps not), the higher the level of sophistication of a product, the less potential it has for hackability. So the only thing you can really do with the more sophisticated things is to destroy them in interesting ways.
I don’t know how to even begin describing James’s keynote. Fortunately, it’s being recorded for later posting on YouTube. I’ll post the link when it’s available.
And that’s the end of the keynotes. Time for the break.
