After a bit of late start thanks to the ministrations of the aforementioned Sun folks, I managed to attend a least a portion of the second morning’s keynotes. I wasn’t quite as impressed with the computational Origami portion of the session as Jason was – though the designs were interesting – but I did enjoy the interview of Mitchell Baker from the Mozilla foundation. While Nat left her almost speechless with an unexpected shot at Netscape, the rest of the interview served as a lucid explanation of the drivers behind the Mozilla subsidiary announcement (which was much discussed).
As with day one, it was my fate following that to meet with a volume of folks at the expense of some really fascinating sessions from r0ml and other OSCON regulars. First up was Palamida’s Mark Tolliver, followed closely by a lunch with Microsoft’s Jason Matusow, meetings with MySQL’s Zack Urlocker, Gentoo’s Donnie Berkholz, Sun’s Bryan Cantrill (who I was trying to connect with Miguel de Icaza) and then a session with Jeff Waugh of GNOME/Ubuntu fame – and a winner of an Google-O’Reilly award for best evangelist (congrats, Jeff ;). While debating dinner options, I eventually defaulted into a wide ranging chat with Sun’s Simon Phipps. Closing the evening I had an excellent time at my Denver neighbor Virtuas’ party at the Red Lion with Bruce Snyder, Matt Filios and a host of Gluecode/Genonimo guys (intriguing discussions on open source Java, among other topics). Best part about the party? I was quite conveniently a single floor from my temporary residence, and therefore was in bed (after a bit of email triage) by a far more reasonable hour.
All in all, Thursday proved to be a highly rewarding day, and one that proved thought provoking and educational on any number of levels. I appreciate the time of all of the individuals who took the time to speak with me, and look forward to continuing the discussions in the future. I’ll have more macro thoughts on trends and observations at the conference later (as well as a Day 3 update), when I’m not rushing off to catch a plane.
Right now, it’s back to Denver. Wish me luck.
