OSCON 2008 Wrap-up

As I’m heading back to San Francisco this morning, I wanted to dump a few notes I took from OSCON this year.

Sessions Attended

I always end up doing more chatting and meeting people than I do sitting in sessions, but here’s a list of what I was able to catch:

• Open Source Physical Security: Can We Have Both Privacy and Safety? Christine Peterson (Foresight Nanotech Institute)
• Changing Education… Open Content, Open Hardware, Open Curricula
• CouchDB from 10,000 ft, Jan Lehnardt (Freisatz)
• Open Source Community Antipatterns, Ted Leung
• Give Your Site a Boost with memcached, Ben Ramsey
• Who Wants a Faster Ruby? Brian Ford (Engine Yard)
• A Tasting Tour of Haskell, Bryan O’Sullivan (Serpentine Green Design)
• Open Architecture at REST, Roy Fielding (Day Software)

I also went to Sun’s party on Wednesday night. Otherwise I tended to hang out with other Apache folks. It was great to see all of you!

Microsoft Sponsors Apache

The big news from OSCON as far as the ASF is concerned was the Microsoft sponsorship announcement. There’s been a little confusion as to what this means, so let me clarify a bit.

A few years ago, the Apache Software Foundation started a sponsorship program. This program is completely separate from our membership status. Sponsors do not get any voting rights in the foundation. Rather, sponsorship is just a very visible and substantial financial donation. Microsoft now joins Apache and Yahoo! as at the platinum level, for which we are very thankful.

Literacy Bridge

I also had a chance to talk to Cliff Schmidt, one of my favorite people in the world, to learn more about his non-profit, Literacy Bridge. Last year Cliff took off to Ghana to assist in a relief mission and the next thing he knew he was starting up his own non-profit to help change the world. Specifically, Literacy Bridge is creating an inexpensive Talking Book device, basically a big MP3 player with recording / playback features and several large navigation buttons which can be programmed to navigate localized content.

I’ve been very impressed with Cliff’s drive and ingenuity. Literacy Bridge is running their first pilot program in just a few weeks, so if you want to get involved in a promising life-changing venture, visit the volunteer page. I know Cliff was specifically looking for some embedded-C developers at OSCON.

Subversion: Jumped the shark?

One conversation I got into more than once was about subversion and git and whether the former was now eclipsed by the later. I’ve only recently started to use git, and while I like the idea of local commits and cheap forks, I’ve always felt that git had a horrible user interface for no other reason than the desire to simply be unfriendly. I’ve sensed a certain amount of twisted pride in those who support git, something akin to the way I feel about stubbornly using emacs as my email client.

Subversion has taken the corporate world by storm. Not the original intention of the developers, but a level of success few open source projects ever achieve. Perhaps its acceptance by project leads and managers worldwide is exactly what is driving some of the cutting edge open source developers to tools like git.

One last note: I heard enough good thing about mercurial that I now want to go back and check that out.

Well, the plane is boarding and I should sign off. So much for OSCON 2008. See you next year.