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Last day of OSCON 2005, and it’s time for the keynote addresses. Nat’s got another amazing shirt on. He says he’s stacked the deck with mind-blowing speakers today…

Up first is Asa Dotzler (the “community guy” for Mozilla, talking about Linux – In Search of the Desktop, based on a blog post he made called Linux not ready for the deskop. Comments he received after that post seemed to be pretty infantile, at least the ones that were posted on his blog and on Slashdot, which doesn’t really surprise me. He had four key points. The first was migration: Linux should be installable next to Windows and bring along as many of their configuration options as possible. The second is stability: he doesn’t mean “it crashes four times in an hour” stability, he’s looking for stability in software and driver versioning. Third is simplicity: just because you can provide a feature doesn’t mean you should. “Complexity and choice frighten Regular People.” And the fourth is comfort: Linux must feel comfortable to Windows users. Asa says that he wants to see people to use Linux in the tens and hundreds of millions. People are hurting using Windows these days — it’s expensive and is a mess of malware. He made some good points that usually get flamed down in the Slashdot flood, and hopefully people smarter than me take some of his points and address them.

The second keynote is by Drew Endy and is titled Open Source Biology. If you want to make Open Source beer you need Open Source yeast. There was a brilliant article in 2600 called “Hack The Genome.” Okay, so what’s the problem in biology? There’s a balkanization of basic biological functions — various functions have different restrictions on them, licencing issues, patents, etc. The basic functions are being patented, which is extremely prohibitive. Quality of code: you don’t want wheat in 2050 to be running the biological equivalent of Windows 98. Right to reverse engineer, react, and reuse: he showed the example of the farmer in Canada who somehow got Monsanto-engineered canola growing on his farm and got sued. Three approaches to fix these: open up the common biological functions registry of standard biological parts. Approach 2: Open DNA, many eyes, fewer bugs. True? Approach 3: Release triggered by uncontrolled access to genetic information or material. BioBricks Foundation was started two days ago to promote openness in the biological community.

Tony Gaughan from Computer Associates is up now, giving a presentation called Open Source Evolution. It’s really turning into a bit of an advertisement for Ingres. I think he’s contradicting himself here: earlier he said it would be great if there were one SQL parser that all databases could use, then he goes on and describes how they came up with their own licence and rejected everything else out there. Worst keynote of the whole convention.

On Evil. Sounds ominous and hopefully funny. it’s by Danny O’Brien of NTK and To Evil! fame, so it’s got a good chance of accomplishing both. What I’m going to do is just give the transcript that Nat Torkington was typing up furiously in the #oscon IRC channel during the talk (with some fixing-up and links put in):

Danny O’Brien: On Evil

I’m a consultant on evil. I delay any evil projects I work on by six months.

It was intended to be more neutral than that. One problem in open source are flame wars: what you’re doing is wrong, what you’re doing is Lisp and therefore fairly neutral.

I wanted to be an objective view, a bit like wikipedia. An article on satanism has all points of view on satanism.

It’s not for me to say who is right or wrong, just who is good and evil.

“The only thing necesary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke

When Nat came and asked if I could briefly summarize what was going to be coming up in the world of evil, I realized I was somewhat thrown. Generally I’m an observer rather than a participant. I didn’t have an insight into what made them good or evil, something I noticed the rest of civilization also lacked.

I broke the number 1 rule of journalism, tried to get involved and tried to in the gentlest way possible mess around with the very nature of good and evil: “Project Do Nothing” which I’ve been doing for the last four months

It primarily inovlves a lot of usenet, high traffic mailing lists, and an exhaustive review of RSS readers, because those blogs don’t read themselves.

Results for 2005: during the period I have been doing nothing, evil has triumphed. Microsoft censoring Chinese blogs, Apple switched to Intel, which isn’t technically evil, merely a sign of the apocalypse, Tim O’Reilly has been questioning the very existence of Perl. Poor Anakin Skywalker, something bad going on with him. Firefox greasemonkey extension problems. Maureen O’Gara writing all kinds of incredibly horrible things about other people. Google launching their Soul Devourer product, which went into beta in may and I haven’t heard very much about it. From what I can tell it was a reengineering of bitkeeper. All sorts of GPL violations, and poor Bruce Wayne’s family were killed.

Standing idly by not as much fun as predicted.

What do you do if you want to spread good in the open source community and the wider society as a whole? As a geek, I’m not terrifically emotionaly engaged in the rest of the world, so there is an extent to which I don’t really care. But while I don’t have that attachment, I do have some laws of robots. First law, through inaction causing harm.

When fighting good and evil, find old platitudes to buoy your confidence.

How to do fight evil? Find a bugtracking system for society. There is none. Or if there is, it’s full of Saddam, “rampant poverty, sorry cannot duplicate” and “please give another test case for your cure for cancer”

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

This quote is from Ghandi or Eric Raymond, not sure who said it first. I do know who would win in a fight, with you there Eric.

This is similar to the whole “sitting back and waiting for evil to take over the world” thing.

State diagram: ignore you -> laugh at you -> fight you -> you win

We don’t have a description of what moves from one state to another.

This is a problem for communities running on ghandi con e.g., clowns. Clowns have been at stage 2 for about 400 years. Sometimes they wander into ignore, but mostly they’re stuck there.

The movement between these states isn’t necessarily in sequential order

It’s much more like (horrendous diagram)

Good example: Ruby. It went from ignore you, to you win in what I estimate was three weeks.

I do not remember anyone laughing at Ruby. I have not found a single Ruby joke.

I didn’t find that model particularly useful.

Next model from Margaret Meade, popular anthropologist and nice little old lady: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change tyhe world. Indeed, it is the only thing that has.”

I don’t think that’s true.

(slide of plate tectonics)

I understand she was an anthropologist taught before continental drift was a recognized theory in science. I suggest plate tectonics have been a far more powerful force … they make the FSF look frankly ridiculous.

This is an interesting picture.

I don’t know whether any of you read “To Good”, mirror universe of my column.

Lot of talk in it about software patents

As you know, patents are horrible things when mixed with your software, enabling other people to claim they own the idea you’re trying to implement.

Two years ago, the fight against sotware patents seemed to be a lost cause. One guy in an office.

Over that time Microsoft had done a mysterious switch from Bill Gates saying patents were a terrible burden in the community, to patents promoting innovation by locking it down.

This is the boat that MS hired in the final stages of the software patent fight.

They began to realize they were losing the hearts and minds of the members of European Parliament.

in a last ditch effort, they hired a boat and sailed it in front fo the members of european parliament. The sign on it read: “Vote for the CII Directive”

The FFII launched a kayak with a flag: “Software Patents Kill Innovation”. They hired canoes immediately when they saw it.

There’s a guy in a suit with three people in t-shirts. There’s a patent lawyer in that dinghy.

There was someone on the balcony looking out on this, saying “I think we know who’s pro-innovation here”

These small microscopic additions to the fight for good actually work. It’s something we recognize in open source software, something people looking in from the outside don’t get.

I remember all those reports proudly proclaiming that open source software wasn’t the anarchist hive mind we’d always thought. Linus wrote the kernel with just a few people helping around the sides, not a democratic supreme soviet.

There are clearly some people who do a lot of work who are clearly very effective. And others of us sit back and let things run of their own accord.

The interesting thing about open source that separates it from the more strongly structured things in society, is you don’t know which type of person you’re looking at. You don’t know how much effect you’re going to have until you get into the canoe and sail out to the boat. You don’t know who you’re going to change the mind of.

At the EFF, we secretly monitor all encrypted transmissions across the entirety of the internet, just a sideline with the NSA, is I get to see what people write to the politicians and what the politicans write back.

Politicians change their mind.

And the last keynote for today is Howtoons by Saul Griffith, completing the accent set (we’ve had Scottish, English, New Zealand, and now Australian). Howtoons are subversive science, technology and engineering tutorials for kids — a HOWTO in cartoon form. It all looks like incredibly fantastic stuff to get kids interested in engineering and science.