Open source world conference 2008
Today started the Open Source World Conference in Málaga. Around 9.000 participants willing to take part during three days in many interesting conferences, workshops, discussions and so on. The event is held in Palacio de Ferias y Congresos, an amazing building full of facilities for this kind of events.
Taking a look to the programme you can get an idea of how many people from different sectors are involved in this event. It's just pity that many meetings will be at the same time.
This morning I've chosen Apache Workshop by Santiago Gala and Thorsten Scherler from the Apache Software Foundation. They were explaining the bases behind the ASF, how they organize the projects, the hierarchy they use, and the concept of the meritocracy.
It's nice the way they work, if you're a commiter and you want to make some special change in the project, you make a proposal that everyone will vote. You just need 3 positive votes and none negative point to be allowed to do it. In the case someone puts a negative vote he needs to make good explanation to convince everyone why he did it.
This kind of workflow allows people that actually do things, to following doing stuff instead of stopping them. If someone run faster than you, just take out from his way and let him to go.
They also exposed a little the Apache License 2.0 which I didn't know so much and now I think it's quite nice for some kind of projects. For standards related for example, this license allows companies to modify the source code by themselves without need to redistribute it. I agree more with this kind of philosophy focused in the community and in the process to develop a successful project instead of focusing everything in the code itself (that could be more the GNU way).
About that way to think and the philosophy behind their way to accept new project proposals you should read the article Worse is better (Richard P.Gabriel). It exposes some nice thoughts that can be used while creating software communities around a nice, but still far from perfect, idea.
After a small break it started the official presentation of the OSWC. Firstly there were some political words as usually followed by the awaited presentation from Tim O'Reilly about web2.0.
It was the first time I was in a presentation from Tim, and I really like his point of view about the whole open/proprieatry software situation and the misunderstanding of the concept of freedom when we speak about software (to use, to copy, to ask for changes, to modify...).
The speech also focused in the obsession of people with the fight between windows and linux when the monopoly actually is coming from a other source. It's not coming from your computer OS but through the internet, like for example google, flickr, amazon, etc. Almost all of them were born using opensource software, but they're proprietary software as well as the criticized Microsoft.
After that just time for lunch and relax while watching the stands from the sponsors. No so much activity there, just in the O'Reilly stand it was nice to see 35% of discount for their nice books. There I got a present: Beautiful code (Thank you!). I was reading nice reviews about this book, so I hope I'll find it interesting, I'll let you know :)
That's all for today let's see how will go the rest days.
3 comments
Tim? Where do you know Mr. Tim O'Reilly from, to just call him Tim? I don't think you've been introduced to him. You should be more polite. Besides that, you should be very grateful to your boss that let you go to this international event without making you keep up with the hours you missed. Why didn't you mention him? Ooops, that's not nice. No, no.
Thank you very much for your comment and even taking the comment about Mr. as a joke, I think it's nice to make short explanation for people that can have some doubts about it.
In the opensource community the way to gain and show respect is completely different from other communities. Here it's not about the titles you put around your name but about the things you do. Aswell that it's not about to discuss meaningless things but at least to say something useful to help the community.
It's seems you missed the first conference (ASF) where they spoke quite nice about that philosophy (meritocracy) which I encourage you to read about.
About my boss he already knows how lucky I feel working with someone as freaky as me :)
Feel free to contact me using mail or contact form
That was really nice!