EuroOSCON 2006 - day 1
The first day of European O’Reilly OpenSource Convention conference taking place this year in Brussels didn’t quite meet my expectations. I was listening to some podcasts from EuroOSCON 2005 and I was really impressed by the quality of the talks. I actually expected lot of thought provoking ideas and discussions, but this year the speakers seem to be repeating what has already been said many times.
The bright moment of the day was my evening conversation with Bram Moolenar, the creator of VIM about opensource, licensing, Europe, my work at SUN and his work at Google.
OpenSource 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly
The opening keynote from Tim O’Reilly was concentrating mostly on the fact that OpenSource as we used to understand it was about the source code, its licensing, and re-distribution. The issue at the moment is that there is a lot of code that is modified and not re-distributed anymore (think Google), and with services like Flickr and del.icio.us it comes to the fact that it’s not open (the system) if you can’t move it (your data in it).
Tim suggested to re-think what open means these days. He also seems to be talking a lot these days about Open Data.
Attention Please! Who We Are? by Tor Norretranders
The opening keynote from Tor Norretranders was touching the topic of what actually motivates the people to do any kind of opensource work.
His talk was very funny (something that is a must if you want to speak at OSCON), and apart from taking very fast conclusions and logical shortcuts such as: we (the developers) are doing opensource because we want to have sex, he basically questioned the Darwin’s principle of survival of the fittest, and came out with the basic principle of motivation for doing the opensource work: in order to have sex, you have to get attention of the partner, which you will get by wasting your time and resources on opensource, to show, that you’ve got enough of such resources, which in turns implies that you must be the good partner you can rely on (physically)..
Very well prepared presentation.
The Microformats: Web of Data by Brian Suda
Microformats are quite a nice example of how you don’t need any formal standard in order to get the useful work done.
Brian was talking about semantic web and how to markup existing HTML data with div and span tags containing agreed-upon CSS class attribute values, in order to give them some semantic meaning.
He has shown some real world examples of live extraction of calendaring data, vcards, and location data from the existing websites. He has also talked about the unix pipe for web, basically a mechanism in which you take an HTML of a web page and pass it through several web sites (doing kind of XSLT-like transformation) in orger to get final data in another format (extracting vcards of speakers and iCal data from conference schedule website).
The Campware Initiative: Free Software for Free Media in the Developing World by Douglas Magoulas
Douglas presented The Campware Initiative, an NGO that develops several GPL applications specially optimized for media like radio (FM and internet) and newspapers (online and printed).
They take these GPL applications and help the locals (in developing countries) to set up such media. Apart from the fact that the locals can then report news on a low-cost platform (having all software for free), this solution helps to build local technology know-how centers specialized in free software products.
He was mentioning several projects that they did in the past, like a radio stations in Serbia, Guatemalla, and Siera Leone.
Cool Tools for Geographic Applications by Schuyler Erle
Schuyler presented the API behind labs.metacarta.com, concentrating in particular on the Gutenkarte project. Gutenkarte project takes texts of classical works of literature from Project Gutenberg, analyzes them and gives you the geospatial view of where the story in the book is happening.
The rest of the sessions that I have attented, The Google Data API by Frank Mantek, An Economic interpretation of the Evolution of Open Source Software by Lorenzo Benussi, and Building Internet Applications with Mozilla XUL Runner by Benjamin Smedberg didn’t quite capture my attention. They were not very well presented, not bringing anything new to the discussion, and just not expected by me at this type of rather expensive event.
September 19, 2006 Conferences, EN, OpenSolaris, Opensource