EuroOSCON 2006 - day 2
Today was the .org day at EuroOSCON 2006. We were running a decent, and friendly OpenSolaris booth. We handed out tenths of OpenSolaris StarterKit DVDs and black anniversary t-shirts.
People coming to the booth were generally interested in knowing more about OpenSolaris, it seems that everyone know what Solaris is (quoting their words: “what Solaris was”), but they don’t know how does Solaris relate to OpenSolaris, what is our business model. In general, they were eager to get the DVDs to try them out on their laptops.
The <i boot> DVD is especially interesting because it allows you to boot all existing OpenSolaris distributions from one media, you just have to choose the right one from the GRUB boot menu. Awesome stuff.
My thanx go to all guys who helped to run the booth, from left to right: Darren Keny (JDS), Chris Beal (Kernel), Garry Pennington (Website), Patrick Finch (Communication), and Pete Dennis (Kernel). I don’t deserve to be at the picture, since I was just running around all those sessions while they took the time to answer the questions.
We had the BoF in the evening, not attended by many people, but I believe this was due to the fact that none of the BoFs at EuroOSCON has actually been attended by many people. We had a quiet and friendly talk about DTrace, SMF, Zones, and ZFS, and we all I believe have learned something new.
Now back to the sessions and keynotes…
honestly.gov by Tom Steinberg
The opening keynote from Tom Steinberg was very inspiring. He presented the mysociety.org project that creates something I would call an interface to your state’s government for human beings.
Websites like theyworkforyou.com and writetothem.com, that are part of the more than two years lasting project present a really nice and simple interface to comunicate with your local government representatives and observe their work.
You can learn on a step by step bases the organization structure of your government, you can get your message heard by your representative, and you can get the other people see what you want to say.
All the communication is archived and you can just browse it in an easy way to get the overview of what was hapenning in the past. Needles to say that as this project gets momentum in the society, the representatives are basically pressed to accept it as the official way of communication, giving you (at least theoretically) the chance to get back in control of the things.
There is a lot to be learned from this interesting project, some of the lessons given by the speaker were:
- Government might not necessarily play to major role in democracy
- Build good tools, don’t waste the money on training (think Usability!)
I wish we ported those to a Czech Language and adapted them for czech conditions, anyone wants to join me? The code of mysociety.org is open.
MAKE and Re-emergence of DIY Tech by Dale Dougherty
Dale’s classical piece on MAKE Magazine, a magazine for hardware (think tools like hammer and screwdriver, not motherboards or VGA or anything computer related) hackers.
Dale makes very interesting comparsion of the minds of classical software hackers and classical hardware (as in hammer-like tools) hackers. We all just want to see how things work, disassembe them, and we all want to personalize and adapt them to our needs.
I must say that we in the former comunist region know a lot about MAKE related things, because generation of our fathers did nothing else than DYI due to lack of goods. Still remember ABC, VTM, or Amaterske Radio magazines?
It’s nice to see that people are interested in this stuff again.
The Creation Engine: Second Life by Jim Purbrick
Jim introduced the Second Life project and its business model, and shared some of the interesting stats about participation in the opensource projects.
He claimed that there is a participation rate around 60% in second life, while at the same time other opensource projects, like MySQL or Linux Kernel or Wikipedia get the participation below 5%. He didn’t have any explanation for this, although I believe it has something to do with the maturity of the project.
I believe the better, more mature the project is, and the better it serves the needs of its customers or users, the less they actually contribute to it. This fact pretty much correlates with what Bram shared with me about participation rate in VIM development.
From Europe to USA: Culture’s Consequences on Open Source Communities and Bussines by MÃ¥rten Mickos
MÃ¥rten is the CEO of MySQL AB, and I wish I knew this yesterday in the evening when I was actually talking to him at the MySQL BoF.
MÃ¥rten shared his views on european vs. american culture and society when it comes to open source and business. He explained why Europe is a cool continet for opensource development, while USA is generally the only place where you can start (and do) the global IT business. The three quotes I wrote down:
- When europeans say “not so bad”, americans would say “wow, amazing”.
- When you do something exceptional in Europe, people are kind of jealeous, while in USA they will encourage you to “shoot for the stars”.
- When you reward the individual in Europe, the rest of the team feels bad, since “all we do is a teamwork”, in USA the promotion of an individual feels just natural.
One of the important things MÃ¥rten mentioned was that open source as we understand it is just a means of production of software, it should not be confused with business, so he basically invalidated the question about “successfull business model around opensource”. Could be one of the reasons why MySQL AB is running a successfull business around opensource software.
Dare, Care, and Share by Tør Norretranders
An extended version of a yesterdays keynote about who we (the people) are and what motivates us to do any work. Again very well presented, kind of a show, using popular terms like sex, but very logical, inspiring, and motivating.
Seems that Tør actually wrote a book about it: The Generous Man.
September 20, 2006 Conferences, EN, OpenSolaris, Opensource