The Goldfish Chronicles

Very late, but finally time has arrived to be able to comment on the last few weeks. I’ll start with ApacheCon.

Ignoring the various flight hell I had (see next blog), ApacheCon was superb. With a couple of ApacheCons under my belt, it means that I’m not meeting as many people for the first time. So less of a “Hi, who are you?” and more of a “Hey! How’s it going?”. I remember the same kind of thing happening with mud-meets/mud-parties. The first couple are tentative, and then it becomes a much more comfortable affair.

That’s not to say I didn’t still get to meet people for the first time. It was very cool to meet both James Strachan and Stefano Mazzocchi for the first time - they were both wise old heads when I started doing open source things five years ago with smart things to say then and smart things to say now. Both have been quiet at Apache for a while, but are getting active again.

I also got to meet Phil Steitz for the first time. Phil’s a fellow Commoner (aka Jakarta Commons coder) and would have made it to ApacheCon a year ago if his employers hadn’t cruelly offered him a juicy promotion in the week before. Alas, this time it was flu that robbed us of Phil’s company for much of the week. Hopefully he’ll be back for next year.

During the Hackathon there were a couple of researchers from floss.syr.edu interviewing anyone they could lure near their microphone for their thoughts on open source communities - so I had fun rambling on about thoughts and ideas.

The keynotes were interesting this year - none of the three were obviously related to Apache. Some liked this and others didn’t - I liked it as it made them much more interesting than the usual open source call to arms, or editorial on the state of open source today.

Cliff Stoll talked about physics experiments he was conducting as a high school teacher - he’s a classic Christmas lecture type of lecturer, all energy and insanity. I like the subject matter, so it was fun and the main take away for me from the lecture was ‘this is what it’s meant to be like…. fun’.

Patrick Ball - CTO of human rights IT company Benetech - talked about the tools they’re creating for human rights groups. Interesting stuff, and it’s cool that they’re using lots of open source software to make it happen.

Howard Taylor - creator of comic ‘Schlock Mercenary’ - talked about how he moved from a day-job at a big corporate to running his own business around a cartoon he created. He used the term ‘fat tail’ to describe where he was (ie: not a big name, but doing well enough now), and it was interesting to see that it was book sales that funded him, the other options not being of comparable return on investment. This at a time when the publishers are complaining of much lower sales. No offense to Howard, but one thing this talk made me think was “Damn, they should have got Iliad to talk”. Howard had a lot of very good information and interesting business ideas, but User Friendly is our comic [quick pause while I read today’s].

All in all, I liked what they did with the keynotes. Something else I also liked was Sander Striker’s opening to the conference. He’s the ASF president and rather than doing the same old “This is what the ASF is” kind of speech, he reported back to the community on what had happened in the last year. I’m a big believer in the importance of feedback loops and this helps. Now we just need to get it in an online report as well.

I’m sure I’ll have more to comment on (especially regarding sessions I went to), but that’s a beginning. Now back to the debian install.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.