O'Reilly blogger Nathan Torkington spent some time with James Turner of O'Reilly News at OSCON 2008 in Portland. He shares some of the trends and technologies that he thinks will play a big role in the near future, including open source biology and the rise of mobile computing.
Damian Conway has a well-deserved reputation as the mad scientist of Perl. His opening night keynote at OSCON 2008 combined Perl programming, the difference engine, quantum mechanics, and general relativity to produce variables which travel backwards in time.
I am a Perl hacker. I have written parts of the core, created CPAN modules and written tons of perl code. In fact I am addicted to it ; or rather, CPAN. I have been wanting to play around with Google App Engine, but I haven't had time to get up to speed in Python. Today at OSCON I met up with Brad Fitzpatrick, who told me he had permission from Google to talk about and work on a Perl on App Engine project.
It's been 10 years since O'Reilly held the first OSCON. At the latest edition of O'Reilly's open source convention, Tim O'Reilly sat down with O'Reilly News to talk about the anniversary. He also reflected on how open source has changed in that period, whether Web 2.0 (a term he helped coin) has met his expectations, and how the nature of technical book publishing has changed.
Larry Wall, father of perl, likens the history of perl to raising a child. In this live interview at OSCON 2008, Larry talks about perl's rebellious teen years, the role of the benevolent dictator, and dual licensing as a quantum physics phenomenon.
Anthony Baxter, one of the lead engineers working on Google's new App Engine, spent some time at O'Reilly's source convention, OSCON, talking about the features that App Engine can offer to developers. James Turner interviews Baxter for O'Reilly News at OSCON in Portland.
Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, talked with O'Reilly News at OSCON, the O'Reilly open source convention. He demystifies the role that the Linux Foundation plays in helping to promote Linux use, provide legal defense, and broker cooperative work between Linux related projects.
Pia Waugh, President of Software Freedom International sat down at O'Reilly's open source convention, OSCON, to talk about some of her interests. These include how women are entering the computer field worldwide and her work getting laptops into the hands of children across Australia and the Pacific islands.
OSCON 2008 -- O'Reilly's annual open source conference -- is going on now. O'Reilly News interviews Allison Randal, co-chair of OSCON, for a quick survey of what's new and interesting in the world of open source. Here's what to see and do and what to watch for in the world of free software for the next year.
Is Terry Childs a Maniacal Hacker-Terrorist or a Capable and Dedicated System Administrator. While the mainstream media paints a colorful picture of villain and vice, Paul Venezia of infoworld uncovers a different story. What if this is just the case of job termination gone wrong.
Social Networks have been around since the inception of bulleting board systems in the mid 1980s, and each one of them seems, for a time at least, to be the radical new paradigm that establishes how people will interact with one another over the web. Certainly, this seems to be the case to those investors (whether individual or corporate) who pay surprisingly stiff premiums in order to be a part of the next big wave, yet in truth social networking sites have a surprisingly consistent "life-cycle" that seems to play out regardless of the "angle" that the sites have.
Why are these people so scared of openness? This may seem a strange and provocative thing to say. Surely ODF is the open technology and OOXML is the proprietary technology? Surely we know this because "ISO" is the organization which is just the puppet of MicroSoft while OASIS is a bastion of community openness!
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