OSCon, OLS and LCA
I just got home from Ottawa Linux Symposium and O'Reilly OSCon.
OLS was very good. It's more kernel-oriented than LCA, kind of
sticking to the strict definition favored by rms that Linux
is
the kernel, not all the associated software. About two out of the
three streams were kernel-oriented. There's also quite a focus on big
machines, because I suppose that's where a lot of the money is.
Ottawa was really beautiful.
OSCon was pretty good. It's about four times more expensive than OSCon, and probably not four times as good, at least for me. It's very inclusive of all open source work, not just Linux. Many people had Macintoshes, and most of them were even running Linux. They have a slightly ridiculous number of parallel sessions - about 12? Still, I guess it works: there was always something I wanted to see. Lots of stuff on scripting languages.
I have a vague sense that it's about the buzz of open source, not actually about open source.
Paul Graham's talk was good. The SCO moot court was good.
There was a panel debate about open sourcing Java, but I think I'm not
the only person there who felt so what?
If Sun feel a
not-quite-free licence suits them best, let it be. My impression from
OSCon is that the most interesting work may be in Perl/Python/Ruby on
top of Parrot/Mono/Rotor/CLR.
There are people outside each room at OSCon checking ID, which gives it a slightly regimented feel. I guess since they're charging so much, and they need to make a profit, it's necessary.
Meg Hourihan shares some thoughts on conference design. It's hard.
posted Mon 9 Aug 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link
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