OSCON 2004 - Conference Day 3
With my flight departing at noon I didn’t get to any actual sessions, just a couple keynotes. David Rumsey exhibited some wonderful tools he build around his impressive map collection, and how these were being integrated with other art and science sources. Novell’s Daniel Patrick continued with some rah-rah about how great OSS is and that companies are becoming more comfortable with it.
It seemed to me that the (or at least a) theme of this year’s OSCON was to pay attention to what you’re doing, i.e. what’s coming in and why you’re doing it, not just focus on how. Certainly this view is somewhat colored by my drifting to many data-oriented sessions, but I don’t remember so many last year. Moreover, the idea of taking a more critical look at content and context was detectable in tutorials and keynotes. Actually, the change in tack likely started last year with Tim O’Reilly’s <a href=”http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2003/view/e_sess/4389”>Open Source Paradigm Shift talk.
Finally, there is an obvious affection in this crowd for Apple, as shown in the sponsorships and the abundance of PowerBooks. However, despite the use of a FreeBSD kernel in OS X, this alliance seems just a tad ironic, since the stuff that makes a Mac or an iPod distinctive is just as closed—perhaps more so— than anything that comes out of Redmond. I guess a distinction is that Cupertino’s stuff appears to "just work" whereas such reliablility is usually lacking in Microsoft’s products. Yet the Mac fascination undermines some of the philosophical arguments for Open Source; perhaps the more honest answer is that the ability to hack around problems (and licensing fees) with OSS is driven by practical necessity and that paying premiums—or even being locked into a platform—isn’t so bad if the products are perceived to be of high quality.