Friday, July 27, 2007

OSCON: Friday Morning Keynote

The Friday morning keynote kicked off with Philip Rosedale the CEO of Linden Lab, who is here to convince us to go to work on their newly open sourced second life client. He's doing a demo of the new first look viewer with the inbuilt voice client, and oddly he's doing a slide presentation inside Second Life, which is displayed on the projector instead of "real" powerpoint. Which is a bit bizarre...




Philip is arguing that Second Life has to, like the Internet become profoundly open. They're going to open source their server software and allow people to run and host their own server, and they've already open sourced their client.

Update: Philip is talking about the Second Life in a web browser client that turned up on the Teen Grid a few weeks ago...

Update: Next up is Jimmy Wales one of the founders of Wikipedia, who is talking about his new project Wikia. Which, cutting through the hyperbole, looks like a site where you can set up and host your own wiki. He's talking about trying to open source search, and Wikia Search, which he's referring to as the LAMP stack for search. Which is fine as far as it goes, but who's going to pay for the hardware? I think Tim O'Reilly even talked about this earlier in the week, even if you had Google's software, you couldn't rebuild Google's service because you don't have their hardware or their back end distributed database.

One of the thing about modern cryptography is that nobody actually breaks codes anymore, they just prove that in theory it's vulnerable to certain attacks. As far as I can see Jimmy is basically pushing the same sort of agenda here, theoretical search. If we have a billion dollar data centre, we could build a search service?

Update: Interesting, they've just acquired Grub, a distributed crawling service. Oh, that's not useful, the Grub client is Windows only...

Update: The next speaker is Simon Wardley from Fotango, who spent some time apologising for his Britishness, before kicking off and talking about the commoditisation of software.

In the 1800's... electricity engineers were the Spice Girls of their time

Update: You have to give the man credit for mentioning Yak shaving. He's talking about open source standards and providing competitive utility market at all levels of the stack,

...it's not good for the planet, and that annoys me because it's not good for Ducks

Update: Next up is our very own Nat Torkington giving the open source movement some therapy, and gaving a talk that was just too funny to blog properly...

Perl is the middle child that isn't getting any attention any more. "Why don't you love me any more?" says Perl? "Look, I've rewired the car..."

Python should get drunk, get laid, and shut up...

Don't think of open source as projects, think of them as people...

Update: It's all about people,

Most people are morons..

Nat's saying that it's easy to be nasty, and the corollary is that it's hard to be nice. This was a great talk for Nat to close out his last OSCON on...

Update: Our final keynote speaker is James Larsson, who according to Nat embodies the hacker spirit, who is going to Pimp My Garbage...



...who it turns out is obviously clinically insane, but in a great way.

Update: ...and got the best reception of the conference. My guess is that a lot of this was for talking about his project which was intended to be,

A computer vision system that takes the drudgery out of boot fetishism

I guess you had to be there...

Update: ...and we're done!

No comments:

Post a Comment