So I just can’t win. On the one hand I have people telling me I write too much here, and on the other I have people complaining that I haven’t blogged OSCON. To the first group I can only say: sorry, them’s the breaks, and to the second I say: not my fault.
OSCON has been a blur from the moment I arrived at the hotel Tuesday around midnight to a lobby full of geeks chatting about Firefox (and stealing all the available bandwidth so I couldn’t get an IP ;). Yesterday, I was on the go from the unconscionable hour of 8 AM till the wee hours of the morning last night, or today, actually. Amidst a sea of Firefox t-shirts (Doc was sporting a nifty blue one yesterday) and some highly creative outfits (for the record, I love conferences where you can wear jeans and get away with it), I’ve been rapidly changing gears from open source in the enterprise (Bob Sutor and Byron Sebastien did excellent jobs in their panel) to SWiK (as did Alex Bosworth) to OpenSolaris to Apache/Tomcat to mobile open source to Geronimo to Linux to Java to identity.
Yesterday’s keynotes were interesting, with Kim Polese of SpikeSource giving a nice talk on the importance of testing, followed up by Andrew Morton and a rather prickly discussion between Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz and O’Reilly’s Nat Torkington. Morton got a hand by taking a pot shot at Solaris, while Schwartz scored some points with some negative comments on patents and positive ones on the GPL. My personal favorite amongst the keynotes, however, was Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny who very much lived up to my blog-derived impressions of him as a very rational, pragmatic kind of guy. Someone needs to get him the memo that open source doesn’t scale, incidentally – he seems have some weird impression to the contrary.
Following that, I was able to attend a few sessions, then met with folks from Covalent, Funambol, IBM, the OSDL, and Sun. To the latter two, I floated my idea of more centralized package and application management that I’ll write more about when I get time; the respective receptions of the idea were – at best – mixed, but I think I simply need to explain it better. I escaped Starbucks for lunch, journeying far across the river to Wildwood for a sit down with Claire Giordano of the OpenSolaris team, where I continued my crusade for more and better documentation.
Dinner was an ad hoc affair, involving Dave Gynn, Stephe Walli and myself attempting to hit the Stonehenge party, getting impatient with a slowly moving line, then dropping in at (surprise) an Irish pub. Unfortunately for Dave, myself and a fellow conference attendee from the University of Arkansas, the local light rail has multiple routes – one of which goes nowhere near the convention center. Conversations that begin with “it can’t really be that far,” are never good, and some walking ensued.
From there it was on to the OpenSolaris late night event at the Doubletree, where various Sun and OpenSolaris folks (Bryan, Chris, Claire, Jim, Liane, Lisa, Sara, Simon, and Terri), twisted my arm into staying out till way past my bed time. Despite their best efforts, I’m not only alive and functional this morning, but dutifully hopping from meeting to meeting here (missing tons of fascinating sessions in the process, alas).
So that’s the news from the wonderful world of OSCON, and hopefully you understand why you haven’t heard from me in a day or so. I’d say that I’ll be back on schedule with regular posts, but today is shaping up very much like yesterday (will be at the Virtuas party this evening) so I’m not sure that’s a promise I could keep. Either way, been a great conference thus far, and if you’re reading this from there remember to drop me a line.
