It’s Tuesday evening and all of the tutorials are behind us. I’ve learned things about Perl no mere mortal should be trusted with, and I found out that Erlang is a really cool language. Now I’m in the Tuesday evening keynotes—or extravaganza, if you believe the marketing hype. They’ve started out with a real bang. Someone, whose name I didn’t catch, is talking about Python. As Alison Randall, the OSCON program chair said, “We have three of my favorite speakers, but first,” there’s this guy. Actually, I’m sure he’s a perfectly decent chap, I just have very little interest in Python.
Originally, I hadn’t planned on arriving at the keynote until 9:00pm, when Damian Conway is schedule to speak on Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy!. I mean, granted, I’m sure I already know all there is to know about it, but it still might be a little interesting.
Anyway, the keynotes got started with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu project. He’s here to speak to us about “Free software and the art of software engineering.” It (whatever “it” is) boils down to three things: innovation, methodologies, and economics.
Innovation. Society has a responsibility to stimulate it. Innovation is extremely non-linear and the key to this is disclosure, as is done in (or was once done in) academia. Free Software is the scaffolding for innovation. The real successes are accessible. The Mozilla products are examples of wildly successful open platforms, with the extension architecture they have provided.
Methodologies. The purpose of methodologies is to organize talent. How is Free software changing the direction of these methodologies. The Free Software people, that is us, are organized and motivated by interest. A second driving factor is that developers are almost never located near each other, so things like pair programming completely fall apart. Creating architecture for collaboration and participation is essential to the success of any Free Software process. While a common set of tools can never be forced upon the community, the ability for a diverse set of tools to communicate with each other is vital.
Economics. It is the combination of the technical change and innovation in economics that really moves the world forward. For example, we had the Web for years before the business models started to spring up around it and really drove us forward, both technologically and economically. Today, there is an increasing use of online services, which both drive technology forward and allow platforms to work together, and more often than not, these services are built on Free Software.
Our great task over the next two years is to lift the Linux desktop from something that is stable and works and is not-so-pretty, to something that is art. At this point, someone started clapping, and a couple of people joined in. As Jaime Zawinsky once said, “We should design software that helps our users get laid.” But really, we need to make software that is phenomenally useable, beautiful, and functional.
Next up, Chris DiBona, the Open Source program manager at Google, joined Allison on stage to present the Google O’Reilly Open Source Awards.
Next up, with Exceptional Software Explained: Embrace Error is Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz. He is fast becoming one of my favorite speakers. He’s here to talk about software development methodologies in Open Source. This talk is almost a sequel to one he gave last year, An Open Source Lexicon. He has a real penchant for language, particularly classical language, and how to apply it to themes in the Open Source community. Unfortunately, because of this very quality, it’s extremely difficult to write about it as he speaks. It’s hard to summarize as he speaks, and he’s far too entertaining to chance missing what he’ll say next.
Josh McAdams then took the stage to continue the long standing tradition—10 years now—of the White Camel Awards. So here’s something I don’t understand. What is it that drives people to design award trophies that have a high potential for lethality? Honestly, don’t run with them. They’re worse than scissors.
Finally, it’s time for Damian’s keynote. But you know what? I’m not going to miss any of it to write about it here. If you missed it, well, you should have been here.