OSCON Europe
In the green pastures of technology trends, Damian Conway leaves no sacred cow un-tipped. This entertaining keynote address, from the 2005 O'Reilly European Open Source Convention, pokes fun at many hot topics for software developers including: software patents, open source, mash ups, online communities, rapid application development, operating system zealotry, and even Joss Whedon's movies and TV shows.
Community and collaboration are cornerstones of the open source philosophy and key assets for businesses built on free software. MySQL, the highly successful open source database, depends on the strength of good relations with its loyal base of developers and users. In this talk, Kaj Arno showcases the role of community in his company's quest to balance the making of great software through open source principles and the need to earn a profit.
David Heinemeier Hansson discusses some of the guiding principles underlying the development of Ruby On Rails, the open source web applications framework. His goal was to develop a toolset that would make web developers happy and to allow them to have confidence in their code. He believes that Ruby on Rails frees the programmer from repetitive drudgery and unnecessary complexity.
It's hard enough protecting your privacy today with threats from identity theft, malware, government surveillance, and consumer profiling. But as storage costs plummet and investment in search technology soars, what does the future hold for the data we're creating right now? How can we best protect our future selves from the quiet hard drives of today, and what might it mean to have an "open data" movement?
The scientific traditions of collaboration, transparency and sharing can be at odds with the constraints of publishers, patents and copy protection. Science Commons is a new project of the Creative Commons with a mission to facilitate the growth of an openly accessible commons for scientific knowledge. In this talk, Paula Le Dieu maps out some of the alternative models for journal publishing, licensing and data sharing which can help promote the flow of scientific results and innovation.
Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy stated that everyone can be connected by six degrees of separation. In his presentation, Marcel den Hartog proposes that the software industry can be broken down into just three degrees of separation from the end user: databases, middleware, and the application. With open source becoming more important to the software industry, understanding the three layers will help a developer be more efficient.
Microsoft's approach to software development may seem at odds with Open Source goals, but for those engaged in the company's Shared Source initiative, there is more common ground than you might think. For the past five years, Microsoft has been steadily increasing its connections with the open development community through active participation in dozens of projects on SourceForge.net. In this talk, Jason Matusow explains how the world's biggest proprietary software house has been striking the balance between community and commercialization.
The European Union's Lisbon Agenda laid out a ten year plan to produce the world's leading knowledge economy by 2010, but all the while the US continues to dominate the software sector. Case in point, open source software innovations that begin in Europe often end up migrating their talents and profits to the US. In this presentation, Paul Everitt makes a compelling case that economic goals of Open Source entrepreneurs and the political goals of the EU planners have much to offer each other.
O'Reilly Media collects and analyzes the data from its book sales, its technology conferences, and from its online communities. The results are compiled into an informal zeitgeist, which is commonly referred to as the "O'Reilly Radar". Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, shares what is on his radar screen during the keynote address from EuroOSCON, on October 18, 2005. Some of the blips on the Radar screen include Ruby on Rails, mashups, Greasemonkey, internet telephony, and rich media.
The rosy picture often painted of our world transformed by high tech successes ignores some serious problems with quality. Michael Tiemann argues something must be done, and soon, since much of our current software functions poorly, and the cost of IT to business is far too high. Open source can help break this jam by designing and building quality into products and processes. An essential step is the recognition that the design problem, and its solution, belong to everyone.