EuroOSCON 2006 - day 3
The best moment of the day was to meet Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu and get a chance to hear his vision (more below).
We (me and Garry) had also a nice and long talk with Matthias Hopf of X.org (and SuSE Germany) about X development, opensource, etc., during which I managed (with his help) to get Xgl/compiz running on my laptop and I can finally enjoy wobbling windows, 3d desktop switching, and transparent windows.
Happy to say that it took me just several apt-get install … commands on my Ubuntu. I’m impressed.
Just before flying back home, I got caught by Douglas Magoulas of campware.org who (among other things) got me thinking about this:
Do you think Ubuntu is successfull because it’s pretty and easy to use?
Yes of course it is, but the bigger part of the story is Launchpad and Ubuntu Forums that make it extremely easy for anyone to observe the project, report bugs, post questions, and generally get attention of developers. This is what builds the community, the collaboration tools.
Did I mention having a mailinglist and bug-tracker is not enough?
Now back to sessions and keynotes…
New Innovation Models, Policy making and Lobbying by Florian Mueller
Florian actually ran to the stage, gave a very fast and complicated speech, and ran away straight to the European Parliament lobbying against software patents.
The thing I was able to grasp from his keynote was that:
- Right wing parties consider open source and free software anti business and anti american, therefore it’s very hard to get their support against software patents.
- It is actually very complicated to get the message to the politicians, because they speak different language then we do.
- Europe is setting the world-wide standard in how the patents should be treated, so we all have to watch out what is hapenning.
Architecting Babel by Robert Lefkowitz
Robert is actually a very skillful speaker, his keynote was funny, full of dancing and hand-waving, but I believe entirely manipulating and controversal to keep the audience amused.
He basically took the premise:
In the past, people had to speak english in order to use software, this thing is now gone thanx to localization and globalization of software.
Adapted it to:
Today, people have to speak english if they want to do programming, and participate in opensource projects like Debian.
And derived the solution to this problem, which was something like this:
We have to localize compilers, keywords in programming languages, names of variables, and code comments, in order to allow the participation of non-english speaking programmers in open source development.
I will leave up to you to decide whether this is a good idea and whether it will help increase the productivity of non-english speaking programmers.
Making the Web of Things by Simon Wardley
A smaller brother of a very interesting talk The Internet of Things given by Bruce Sterling. I must say that Simon tried to inspire himself by Bruce a lot, and you could smell it in the way he was presenting his slides, making dramatic pauses and inserting random funny interruptions.
Nevertheless, Simon knows something about hardware prototyping and machines used nowadays to produce things from real matter.
He was extending the idea of opensource and programming into the hardware world, in which you theoretically could be able to print things in 3D much the same way you are now printing in 2D (photographs, black & white). At home, right from your desk.
Music 2.0: The Coming Revolution by Colin Brumelle
Coing actually had very well prepared (in content and design) presentation, kind of summarizind the history of music industry, distribution channels, involved parties, etc. He logically derived why the existing channels don’t work for musicians, how the music industry is evil, etc.
He presented some interesting projects like Pandora and last.fm and provoked classical flames in the audience about who is right and who is not, and how the things really work, and how they should be, and are not.
Ubuntu: Improving Collaboration in the Free Software World by Mark Shuttleworth
Mark is a nice guy, I don’t know whether it is because he comes from Africa, but he can get people together.
He speaks very clearly, I would say silently, without any strong expressions and too much jumping, really worth listening and talking to this guy.
His presentation was circulating around the following points:
- Pretty is a feature: we need to encourage more collaboration among designers and programmers, clean, consistent and nicely looking facelift is what makes people happy. Did I mention usability?
- Consistent packaging: who cares about implementation details, what matters is whether you can apt-get install netbeans flashplayer google-earth
- Simplified licensing: forget religion wars, create framework conveying the message, much like Creative Commons do, and forget license details and incompatibilities.
- Pervasive presence: be everywhere, get people know what your name is, strong brand management, consistent message.
- Pervasive support: perception matters, there is a paid support available for linux, but people do not perceive linux as being supported operating system. Improve it.
- localization: make it easy to translate software into various languages, did I mention Rosetta.
- getting it together: improve communication among free software projects, coordinate release schedules, planning, bugfixing.
- be inovative: do not only copy existing features of other software applications, but invent new things, be cool.
- support for new devices: automated driver installation, perfect packaging, integration, integration, integration, it’s all about integration, get this by default.
- common packaging format: pretty self describing.
September 22, 2006 Conferences, EN, OpenSolaris, Opensource