Sadly, the O'Reilly Open Source Conference 2000 in Monterey, California is now over. And for those of you who remember the smiley question at the Internet Quiz Show... :-(
Day four started off with keynotes from Tim O'Reilly and Gregory Benford. I always enjoy Tim's keynotes, as they tend to act as course corrections for the open source community. I really liked two small points: Tim reiterated that Microsoft is no longer the ultimate bad guy and that open source communities need to continue focusing on licenses. These are two areas that I think the open source world needs to work on. If you get a chance, be sure to check out Tim's webcast keynote.
Tim was followed by Gregory Benford, a physicist and science fiction writer, who talked about the coming "Comfy" culture. Mr. Benford's keynote seemed unrealistic to me. He prophesied a future where machines will advertise to us, as individuals, by reading our electromagnetic IDs as we pass by them. Hence, his whole argument started off on the wrong foot. He also picked on Bill Joy, the Sun Microsystems cofounder, whom I really like. And he dismissed environmentalists and technology critics as puritans and prohibitionists. In any case, this talk left me wondering what will happen to the power of privacy advocates and Internet communities to effect change in the future. Do they just disappear into the ether? I couldn't stomach it.
Speaking of not stomaching, I don't think anyone at the conference really enjoyed the cold lunches. So I had to grab some food from the snack bars during the morning break. Mmmmm.... Snickers and Hershey bars. Now that's a lunch!
After that, I joined O'Reilly editor Laura Lewin (I keep wanting to say Lemay there--sorry Laura) and editor in cheif Frank Willison for Guido von Rossum's "State of Python" talk. Guido discussed some trivial and non-trivial additions to the Python 2.1 and Python 3000 language (the latter, Frank tells me, is so they can be sure to get it out early, unlike Microsoft.) One of the best additions, I think, is to give Python stronger data typing, and I hope to see that implemented soon.
The next talk I attended was Jeremy Allison's Win32/Linux Porting session. This was a great summary of all the pain that modern programmers go through taking their Win32 applications and porting them to a Linux environment. And Jeremy intends to publish his material one way or another very soon. I really enjoyed his non-biased view on the good parts and the bad parts of each platform, including the arcane factoid that Linux processes start faster than Windows threads. If you have any interest in doing a solid port of your Win32 program, you really need to take a look at his slides.
I wished I could have attended more talks in the latter half of the afternoon, but I had to catch a plane back to Austin. But in summary, this conference has been pretty good. Some of the talks were excellent, some were average, only a few made me want to whip out the red editor's pen and hack and slash.
The best part about the O'Reilly conferences is that you have a chance to meet some of the most influential people in the industry, and also talk with them for longer than a five minutes. For example, I was able to meet the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Python creator, Guido von Rossum, as well as Greg Stein, David Ascher, Eric Raymond, Tom Christensen, and others. That's something you don't get at JavaOne and Linuxworld. If you really want to meet some people, I encourage you to come to an O'Reilly conference.
However, I should warn you up front: If you sit at a table with me and my friends, I'll always drag you into the conversation, which is what happened at the Caribbean Jam to an unsuspecting individual from Microsoft (We hid the Bill's Bitter Brew coasters pretty fast.), or I'll drag you onto the limbo floor, which is what happned to Laura, Nancy, Jennifer, and Susan.
Thought I forgot a top-ten list, did you? Well, maybe it's just a side effect of arriving home half-asleep from the flight, but after waking up Friday morning, I briefly thought this conference was all a strange dream. So, without further ado...
The Top Ten Reasons Why I've Been Whistling the Theme from "X-Files" All Morning:
See you next year at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference 2001 in San Diego.
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