As promised, a Day 3 summary at OSCON, albeit one three days later. This one will be short, because it was a very straightforward day. Morning began early with a 7:15 AM customer reference call (good thing I called it a night at a reasonable hour on Thursday evening.) Between that and getting caught up with my colleague before he took the first few days of this week off, I was over at Friday’s keynotes a bit late. While I missed Asa‘s deconstruction of the Linux desktop, regrettably (will have more on it as times allows), I did manage to catch sessions such as Danny O’Brien’s “On Evil,” which was excellent and highly amusing.
The really interesting part of the day, however, came shortly after the conclusion of the morning’s keynotes when I had the opportunity to sit down with GNOME and Ubuntu’s Jeff Waugh. Besides being a good guy and entertaining speaker, Jeff’s got excellent answers for many of the vexing questions faced by Linux desktop advocates today. Rather than focus on what the desktop can’t do – support iTunes, for example – Jeff and company are focused on meeting the needs of the masses with precisely the sort of stripped down approach that Asa advocates and Firefox embodies. We chatted for so long on first Ubuntu then GNOME stuff that I actually missed a session I’d planned on attending, the Women in Open Source panel (sorry, Claire), but it was certainly worth it to get some time with one of the guys behind a community oriented, Debian based distro that shipped 1.4M CDs in the past year (“shipped” refers to actual physical CD’s that were manufactured and shipped out, and therefore does not include the download or redistributed numbers). Will have more on Ubuntu (and Gentoo) shortly, but thanks for the time Jeff.
Following that it was straight to the airport for me, where we took off more or less on time, and were only held up for about 15 minutes on our arrival by a plane occupying our gate. I’m making a quick day trip to San Francisco (customer gig, not LWW unfortunately, though I might try and stop by for an hour or so) and hope that my luck holds up. It’s possible, as my curse may have transferred to that friend of mine who made the 16 hour Bos – Den transit; he got delayed for a little over 3 hours on the way back from Chicago yesterday.
Anyhow, that’s the end of my time at OSCON, and I’d like to thank the O’Reilly folks for putting on such an excellent conference. Thanks again as well to everyone who took time out to sit down with me – it made the conference that much more rewarding. Looking forward to attending next year. Apologies to folks like Active Grid’s Peter Yared, Eclipse’s Bjorn Freeman-Benson, and Optaros’s r0ml who I didn’t manage to grab time with. Will try and catch you guys on the phone shortly.
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