Oscon, Day 3
2006-07-28 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearAnd another delibhtful OSCON ends, with a "final snack" in the ballroom lobby. Not terribly well-arranged -- the plates were in the middle and the food on both ends. This left one end blocked as queued-up people scrambled for plates, and one end practically unpopulated. Well, I got my cheese eventually, so I'm happy.
Today's opening keynote was Dave Bradley on "25 years of the IBM PC" -- Dave is the inventor of the famous three-finger salute that we still know and love today. He pointed out that the original BIOS was at least somewhat open source -- it was printed in the technical manual. I remember consulting it in order to tweak the floppy driver to handle odd formats.
Damian Conway's keynote was spectacular and highly amusing, but was basically stand-up comedy rather than anything really useful. But if you see any advertising from a company called CXAP, remember that they have a patent on replacing a consonant in a word with an X while pronouncing the original letter.
Both sessions were useful: "10 tools developers need" from Karl Fogel of the subversion project, and "Livejournal's Secret Spinoffs" from Artur Bergman and Brad Whitaker of SixApart. Some of their stuff for serving ultra-high-volume websites look useful.
The closing keynote was Eben Moglen -- inspiring.
One theme that came up several times -- in at least three keynotes including Damian's and Eben's; I forget the third -- was that Open Source has won. It is now widely recognized that OS is the most effective way to develop software. Proprietary software companies are fighting a rearguard action now.
Today's opening keynote was Dave Bradley on "25 years of the IBM PC" -- Dave is the inventor of the famous three-finger salute that we still know and love today. He pointed out that the original BIOS was at least somewhat open source -- it was printed in the technical manual. I remember consulting it in order to tweak the floppy driver to handle odd formats.
Damian Conway's keynote was spectacular and highly amusing, but was basically stand-up comedy rather than anything really useful. But if you see any advertising from a company called CXAP, remember that they have a patent on replacing a consonant in a word with an X while pronouncing the original letter.
Both sessions were useful: "10 tools developers need" from Karl Fogel of the subversion project, and "Livejournal's Secret Spinoffs" from Artur Bergman and Brad Whitaker of SixApart. Some of their stuff for serving ultra-high-volume websites look useful.
The closing keynote was Eben Moglen -- inspiring.
One theme that came up several times -- in at least three keynotes including Damian's and Eben's; I forget the third -- was that Open Source has won. It is now widely recognized that OS is the most effective way to develop software. Proprietary software companies are fighting a rearguard action now.
