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Steve Riggins of PMUG sends in a look-see at OSCON 2004 in Portland (Thursday, July 29 report)
PORTLAND -- O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2004
By Steven Riggins, PMUG
Thursday AM:
Omug (the statewide Oregon MacPioneers User Group) was kind enough to award me with a pass to this year's OSCON. I've been terribly busy all week but I took some time out this morning to come see what was going on. I chose this morning because the keynotes did not seem to be about software, but about open thinking and open source ideas in general. I need more balance in my life, so I figured this was a good day to choose.
I woke up at 6 and then woke up again at 7:30. Sleepy-eyed, I left the protection of my Alohian suburbia and headed for OSCON. Being a geek, I normally would have been here all week, but alas, work prevailed. Having had a relatively smooth trip over the pass known as 26 that is usually more precarious than an open source project, I pulled into the Smart Park and headed to the Marriott.
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The most important thing that I see at this conference is that there are more women here than any previous geekified conference I have been to. |
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I finally found registration downstairs and got into the Dyson/Dyson/Dyson keynote a bit late, which was on open thinking. I missed the reason why Esther was not there, but George and Freeman were quite informing on how the world must think more openly. Discussion ensued about how people are hacking on their little devices now and it was pointed out that we have always done this -- 30 years ago you were not a "man" unless you had hacked on your carburetor.
My favorite quote of the speech was "We don't need a department of Homeland Security, we need a Department of Homeland Arithmetic." Actually, George's response to "What do you think about the end of the universe" to which he replied, "Well, it doesn't look good" brought the most laughter.
As a geek, I sit here on the floor using my TiBook 500mhz with Linksys 802.11g card and notice that of the laptops I can see around me, 6 are Macs and 2 are others. There are many more laptops but not that I can discern clearly enough to include in the tally. But I can sure see Exposé in action! Anyone, and I mean anyone, who thinks Apple's move to OS X was a bad idea is clearly not getting it. OS X, based on FreeBSD unix, is why there are so many Mac laptops here at OSCON. More geeks using Macs means more Mac software. More Mac software means more Mac solutions. More Mac solutions means more Macs sold. More Macs sold means more Mac commercial developers. More commercial developers means more Mac solutions.
See how this works, from the ground up? We should be thinking about this when it comes to politics.
The Apple Developer Connection is here in full force -- Go Apple! They are exhibiting, have a Airport room and are hosting a party tonight. I am getting better signal in the back of this huge conference room than I get in my house -- Impressive.
DNA synthesizers are "not for teenagers" yet, but they are coming -- Do it yourself DNA mutations. Could this be the end of us, true viruses made at home? The question is "Why is this bad?"
Bdale Garbee spoke on community development. He worked on the Debian project. I guess he works at HP now, because there is a HP logo in the upper right corner of his slides. I'm just going to jot notes. "Linux and Open Source development began as a hobby, but is now big business." Most people got started in Open Source via a hobby -- even the Wright brothers. Four years after after Sputnik, OSCAR, a hobbyist satellite was launched. 30 years after OSCAR-7 was launched, it is still functioning. OSCAR-40 cost 4.5 million in donations and 10 years to build and launch, which happened in Nov. 2000. Debian is completely volunteer/international organization. One of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions.
His best comment was that people should chuckle less when we overhear people trying to communicate about technology in a feeble manner but rather think about what we can do in our own real-world communities to increase technology literacy.
The most important thing that I see at this conference is that there are more women here than any previous geekified conference I have been to. Still, the ratio of men to women is too large, but maybe that is simply because either women could not get the time off or women are doing more important things with their time. However, this world needs more females involved in open source, software and technology in general. Balance and karma are good things, so don't discourage your daughters from being software engineers, chemists, physicists or any other career they may dream about.
Open Source is terribly important to the world. Enough so that I am full-time working on a project now that is open sourced. We need to think about other ways to generate money and help get tools into people's hands so they can be creative, speak their minds and have the same tools that people with money have. If someone goes to a library, they should have the same tools without the library having to had give Microsoft a billion dollars for Office and Windows, or Apple for OS X.
Conferences such as this are helping to spread the word, spread the knowledge and hopefully, just hopefully we'll get more tools into more people's hands across the world.
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The O'Reilly Open Source Convention
Portland Marriott Downtown
Portland, Oregon
July 26-30, 2004
http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/
More information on the OSCON sessions:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/sessions.html
END
Omug contact: ydkm@mac.com
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