The Friday morning keynotes opened with a video demonstration of the capabilities of Blender. Apparently, it renders scenes using crappy 80s computer-generated music. It’s no Wall-E, but it’s quite pretty.
First up this morning Allison introduced Benjamin Mako Hill of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. He will be speaking about Advocating Software Freedom by Revealing Errors. He seems to be far too highly caffeinated for the room this morning, and is speaking very quickly, and the sound system is too loud, so I don’t entirely know what’s going on.
The gist of the talk is that, when errors become visible to the user, it exposes something about the underlying technology. He’s provided several obvious examples of ATMs crashing with Windows errors. He runs the Revealing Errors Blog, too.
Next up is Dawn Nafus of Intel, speaking about Three Challenges. Unlike most speakers at OSCON, she is an anthropologist. There is a notion, particularly in the mobile devices industry, is that adding more and more data is equivalent to adding context. This is phenomenally untrue. Data without context is, more often than not, useless.
Her second challenge is the global food crisis in food and water, particularly in the developing world. We Open Source folks are quite good at decentralizing power, just look at how so many of our projects are organized. Technology is fast going mobile, and as these devices become cheaper, they are more easily put into the hands of people in the Third World. There are many applications for this technology, we just need to be creative about how we go about taking advantage of this proliferation in technology.
The third challenge is to strengthen global growth in technology producers, not just consumers. We must better understand where growth is coming from.
Annoyingly, we have another speaker from Microsoft this year, Sam Ramji. He’s, apparently, here to tell us about Open Source Heroes. He’s telling us about platform trends, something we already know about. There’s some slide about applications moving into Internet moving into Web applications over the time frame 1995 through 2005.
Microsoft sees Open Source growing strong over the next decade, but it’s hard to take him seriously, given the company’s history. While he’s talking about Microsoft’s contributions to Open Source projects and the work they’ve done to improve their ability to work on Windows, I’m constantly on edge around Microsoft, wondering what they really have planned. In fact, I may have just answered my own question. Improving the use on Windows, thus attempting to ensure the continual use of Windows. They’re desperate to hold on to the market share they’ve so deceitfully gained.
This talk can be summed up as, Hey look, we’re not evil, look at this boringly enumerated list of Open Source stuff we’ve done.
He’s announced that Microsoft has become a “platinum” sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. That doesn’t sound good to me. Do people forget the embrace-extend-extinguish history of the company? Should we really trust them so much?
Next up, refreshingly, is Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems, speaking to us about Language Inflection Point. There’s background music, and he’s speaking very quickly. He’s going over slides demonstrating various ways of measuring the popularity of programming languages. From search engines to book sales.
He took a survey of the room. A show of hands for who is using various languages and if we would still use it in an ideal world. Python and Ruby were the only two languages with a positive delta, more people raised their hands to show that they’d use it in an ideal world than those who currently use it.
From there, he launched into a discussion of each language and their benefits and drawback as he sees them. Obviously subjective, but they’re not entirely bad points. He never got to Perl, so I’m a bit disappointed.
Finally, we have Jeremy Ruston of BT Design, who created TiddlyWiki. He’s here to tell us about Learning from Airports.
At airports today, the actual actions of taking off and landing is more a side-show. There are more shops and things like security lines (and waiting), and the actual arrivals and departures are a very short part of anyone’s visit.
Airports do serve as an excellent analogy for technology standards. Single sign-on: passports. Access tokens: boarding passes. Standard documentation: universal signage.
The keynotes wrapped up with a question and answer session with each of the morning’s speakers. The first question, unsurprisingly, was about patents, and what will it take for Microsoft to commit to not using patents against Open Source. The speaker claims that developers should never have to worry about it, but it was unconvincing.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of the questions were directed to the Microsoft representative. They ranged from (and I’m paraphrasing), why Microsoft is evil and patent bashing thinly veiled as questions. Unfortunately, the presence of the Microsoft shill speaker on stage led to a completely wasted question and answer session.
But now it’s break time, so I’m off in search of more coffee. OSCON starts way too early in the morning.
[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008[/tags]