Benjamin Mako Hill of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and FSF talks about Advocating Software Freedom by Revealing Errors. He is saying that good technology is invisible to the user and that you cannot advocate free or open technology to people who do not know what the technology is. Technology is invisible until it goes wrong. When the average person is shocked that an ATM runs windows is when they get a blue screen and they realise that they run Windows a home and no it is not reliable and that they are trusting their money to it. He says that Windows is not the problem, but errors are ( insert cheap joke here. ) He is now showing us a online site that regexs news from the AP, the regex replaces words considered inappropriate such as ‘gay’ with more appropriate words such as ‘homosexual’, which is fine until you find an article about an athlete whose last name is ‘Gay’. Queue very amusing headlines. As an aside, I used to work for a company that tried to produce a text filter to remove potentially offensive words from a chat room for children, which is fine until you try and sell this software to clients in Scunthorpe. Noone notices until it goes wrong. Technology reflects the views of it’s creators, it should reflect the views of it’s users.
Dawn Nafus of Intel. She is an anthropologist, which is interesting.
She has three questions ….
Developed cultures are an audit society.
1) The world is awash with large datasets, how do we give life to them ?
Avoid the add-GPS-and-stir trap
Location is not Context, but just more auditing. It has to become human orientated or it becomes creepy.
2) Global crisis in food and water is hitting everyone to a greater or lesser degree.
1 in 3 do not have clean water, 50% world income comes from agriculture, farmers in the US using mules over tractors due to fuel costs.
She talks about talking to tree loggers about hunter gatherer societies which rely on trees for food. The people do not mind the loggers, trees are for everyone. So they geotag trees that are important for food or are considered sacred.
3) Strengthen global growth in technology producers, not just consumers.
Do we understand where growth comes from ?
She is talking about countries such as China, India and Brazil, which are the producers, to other countries such as the US, UK, France, Australia etc. which are the consumers.
Sam Ramji from M$ is discussing open source at M$. He sees open source as the code reuse promised by OO technologies such as C++. He lists the open source companies that M$ are now working with rather than against, Samba being the most interesting. Iron Ruby and Iron Python which are .NET implementations of their namesakes. They are still supporting Java …. really ? … ok. He wants us to be reassured that M$ are serious about open source and not trying to undermine it. He is wearing his firefox tshirt. He is talking about Poi, which should be interesting if it works. He wants to assure us that M$ are contributing back to open source projects. They have just announced that today, M$ has been accepted as a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. The quote from the ASF president is that m$ “‘gets it’ with reagrds to the ASF way.”
Tim Bray of Sun, talking about dynamic languages.
What languages are we programming in ?
langpop and tiobe apparently gives goods stats, followed by a show of hands from the audience as to wether you currently are using a language and wether you would in an ideal world.
Does language design matter ?
PHP is poor but popular, Java the language imposed a “nuclear winter”, but the JVM remains important. C is flawless as a high level assembler and you cannot ignore it. Then there are the new dynamic languages. He likes Erlang for stability, OCaml for speed, he likes Scala, as does James Gosling, and the Fan language.
Static or dynamic typing, an argument many feels have been settled, but it really hasn’t, and I have to say this is an argument I have resolved for myself this week.
For a programmer, it’s a good time to be alive.
Jeremy Ruston founder of Osmosoft and creator of TiddlyWiki which was acquired by BT is using a analogy of an airport to open source. Single sign on, passport ID is used to acquire boarding passes which become ID. Interoperability between airlines. Simplicity of design, common design and shared housekeeping.
I hate airports, the design and information flow is terrible, but they sort of work and they do what people need, which is the only reason they continue to exist. Hmmm .. maybe it is a good analogy.
Q&A session.
It took 12 years of Samba prior to M$ helping out, why trust M$ ?
Ask Samba, who they have an open dialogue with, M$ now test Samba using the SMB tools they use, and so on.
M$ are using their money to force stuff through open standards et al rather than collaborating. It’s like screwing the porcupine, one prick against thousands, what’s changing ?
I was too busy laughing to hear the answer.
Will M$ not enforce patents against users of open source software ?
They claim they haven’t, but did not mention funding the likes of SCO.
Things are heating up, Sam Ramji has definatly the hardest job in the industry.
Zealot stands up and claims that while people are “doing the smart thing” switching from static to dynamic languages, they are “doing the dumb thing” going from “strong” licensing, such as the GPL, to weak licenses. As I said it’s an argument that has already been won for me this week, and like Tim Bray, I don’t lose sleep.
UPDATE : Networkworld covers how Sam Ramji’s fared at OSCON. I think the man is probably paid danger money to go out there, and I believe he is fairly sincere in what he says, I just think he is a pawn in a big game.
Ramji, dressed in a Firefox T-shirt like it was a virtual bullet proof vest, is use to the machine gun fire and didn’t shy away.
But it wasn’t all altruism, Ramji says the code makes it easier for PHP developers who routinely develop on Windows to actually deploy their applications on the platform.
“Those kinds of innovation are what lead companies like IBM to contribute to open source,” he says. “You have to find an operational business framework – legal, financial, development – that lets you move forward methodically. You can’t be a corporate-level contributor and have everything be ad hoc.”
“We feel that if we fight Sam we weaken him,” said Russell Nelson, the licensing approval chairman at the Open Source Initiative. “But it is going to take Microsoft time to figure out what they can execute. The biggest problem is that open source people feel under attack, under siege.”
Ramji says he battles on two fronts, those within Microsoft that see open source as a threat and the open source side which sees Microsoft as a villain.
I have to say that I am lucky enough now that M$ are completely insignificant in my life these days, I’m not going to say it will always be this way, but for now, for me anyway, M$ is just a non-issue.
