It’s been very enjoyable so far. After Suparna’s talk, I stayed on for “How we Fix the Software Industry with Open Source” by Christof Wittig of db4objects. He spoke about how commercial open source software can help the growth and sustainance. I was looking forward to hear more about db4objects, but despite being non-tech, his talk had a few good points. The most interesting part was the questions people asked – what if Oracle GPL’s, or how companies have to keep innovating to stay in the market. The Innovator’s Dilemma sounds logical, and something a business should be aware of.
I stepped out to visit Manish after lunch. It was a surprisingly pleasant experience with Adobe. More on that later.
When I came back, I was just in time for Andrew Cowie’s “On The Cutting Edge: solving the fundamental structural problem of the free software movement” His talk last year was the most popular, this one was good, but a few notches down. He talked about how the current version control is limiting collaboration between multiple projects and how it will not work in an occassionally connected environment. Same for bug tracking systems. He then described how he, along with a few fellow hackers, came up with a tool to beat the probems with makefiles and configure scripts.
The speakers’ dinner rocked with people joining and talking about a lot of things about FOSS and beyond. We also celebrated Karunakar‘s birthday. Spent some time working on slides for my talk today in the night 😉
This morning started with “KDE4 And You” by Aaron Seigo. He talked about what’s coming in KDE4. There are lot of things interesting – especially the abstracted libraries for VoIP, multimedia etc and the new design and icons.
As of now, Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs is taking questions after his presentation on Puppet – Portable System Automation. The tool looks good and is in use at Stanford and Deutsche Post. It’s done in Ruby and wraps platform specific package management tools like dpkg / rpm etc.
Getting ready for Rasmus’s Getting Rich with PHP5 now!