OSCON: Wednesday Keynotes

Published 2006-07-27    Printer-friendly version

Wednesday's keynote address was really a series of short keynotes, introduced by O'Reilly's Nathan Torkington, an informally dressed and chatty Kiwi with a fond memory of past OSCON blasts. Nat shared stories of luminaries at past OSCONs, including two thirds of the family Dyson, including son George. I'm particularly sorry I missed that conference, as some years ago I lived across the water from the Belcarra treehouse that was once George Dyson's home, as described in The Starship and the Canoe.

Conference organizer Tim O'Reilly (well, Nat and his team actually do the work) kicked things off with a few points on the open source phenomenon. He discussed Web 2.0's architecture of participation, and pointed out that in a Web 2.0 world, open source licenses are obsolete since end users typically don't need licenses to use web apps. He also mentioned the phenomenon of asymmetric competition, noting that the #7 site on the net, Craiglist.org, has 18 employees, while the rest have thousands (Disney, at #8, has 129,000).

Some open source frameworks, O'Reilly pointed out, have come out of closed source projects. Both Django and Ruby started as proprietary applications, and the frameworks were extracted.

O'Reilly is a fan of FireFox plugins, Asterisk (the open source PsBX), and the Ubunto Linux distro. He also plugged labs.oreilly.com, where you can search some 2.6 million lines of code from O'Reilly books.

O'Reilly was followed by Greenplum's Scott Yara, who presented an amusing comparison between open source and rock'n roll, asking if they were twins separated at birth, and admonishing attendees not to get stuck in "we're huge in Belgium" mode. Anil Dash of Six Apart (TypePad, MovableType, VOX, LiveJournal) ripped through an entertaining talk titled "Trying to Suck Less: Making Web 2.0 Mean Something."

The final keynote as by Mike Olson of SleepyCat, another recent Oracle acquisition. When asked if PostgreSQL or MySQL were looming acquisition targets, he replied that PostgreSQL's licensem ade acquisition almost impossible, and he alluded to Oracle's previous unsuccessful attempt to buy MySQL.

The keynote session concluded with a panel Q&A. From left: Nat Torkington, Tim O'Reilly, Anil Dash, Scott Yara, Mike Olson.

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