The final day of OSCON 2008 is upon us, and it kicks off with a keynote address by Benjamin Mako Hill from MIT Center for Civic Media titled “Advocating Software Freedom by Revealing Errors“. If we’re talking about control over technology, we must first understand that technology is powerful. Developers of technology have a huge amount of power. This gives them a profound control over users. Developers understand this, but most users don’t understand that that well because they don’t understand the technology as well.
Good technology should be invisible, like eyeglasses. You don’t look at the eyeglasses, you look at the world. This is why people are surprised when an ATM crashes and they see a Windows error interface — the operating system is normally invisible to them.
OneNewsNow has a hidden intermediary that is only visible when it gets things wrong: witness when Tyson Gay set a US record in the 100-meter dash. ONN has a script that replaces certain words for others — in this case, replacing ‘gay’ with ‘homosexual’. Thus their AP feed contained a story about Tyson Homosexual winning the 100.
Check out the Revealing Errors Blog.
Next comes Dawn Nafus of Intel talking about “Three Challenges“. There are three areas of rapid social change where there are real contributions that technology as a whole can make.
Challenge one: The world is awash with large datasets. How do we give life to them? Answer: avoid the ‘add GPS and stir’ trap. There’s this misconception that adding data is the same thing as adding context.
Challenge two: Global crisis in food and water. Fuel prices have skyrocketed, food prices have skyrocketed, food and water supplies in developing and third world countries are no longer secure. 50% of the world derives its income from agriculture.
Challenge three: Strength the global growth in technology producers, not just consumers. Technology production is unequally distributed. Technology adoption (in relation to economic strength) is taking off in eastern Europe, China, South America, and parts of Africa.
After Dawn is Sam Ramji from Microsoft with a talk titled “Open Source Heroes“. Well, the title doesn’t seem to be right, he’s talking about Microsoft’s future with open source. Kicking off with a history of platform trends — started off with applications running on single machines, then the internet came along, and then along came web apps. In the future, we’ll see software+services, the programmable internet. Open Source will continue to be there as well.
Microsoft has had their fingers in many bits of Open Source projects, from Linux and Apache to Ruby and Java. They submitted their license to the OSI. This section really looks like Microsoft trying to say how good they are with Open Source.
OH BOY BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: Apache Software Foundation is welcoming Microsoft as a platinum sponsor.
A few promises: “I will engage openly and honestly with you every time.” “I’m dedicated to having the tough conversations.” “We will solve the next generation of technology challenges by participating and contributing together.”
Tim Bray from Sun is up now, talking about a “Language Inflection Point“. Whare we programming in? C, Java, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Perl… Should you do things in Perl, Ruby, or Python? In C++? (we hates it, it makes our eyes burn) In PHP? PHP has some interesting trends, and there are a number of good apps written in PHP (WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal). “I would rather drive nails in my head than write a real application in PHP.”
Does language design matter? PHP doesn’t have good language design, but it works.
Should you do things in Java? “A lot of what is happening in languages now is unpausing the nuclear winter that Java imposed on the programming language space.” – Ted Leung
Tim is starting to have real problems with Java. “I don’t really have time to write thirteen lines of code to have four that do anything.” One of the legs of the Java tripod (JVM, APIs, language) can be replaced with other languages: Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and others.
Should you do things in C? It’s old, it doesn’t have new features like newer languages, but Tim says “C is flawless”. There are all kinds of things written in C: operating systems, databases, other languages, web infrastructure…
But what about other languages like OCaml, Erlang, Groofy, Fan, or Scala? And what about static or dynamic typing? There are good things that static typing gets you, but there are also good arguments for dynamic typing.
And last up is Jeremy Ruston from BT Design giving a talk titled “Learning From Airports“. BT wanted to learn about the innovation happening at the edges of the open source community, so they acquired TiddlyWiki, which is the project Jeremy worked on before working at BT.
There are a lot of things at airports that don’t have anything to do with the actual taking off and landing — shopping, restaurants, hospitals… Airports have single sign-on (boarding passes). The participants in the platform are trusting the platform itself for identification. Gate systems are standardized to allow all planes. Airports are very consistent in their signage.
Jeremy tried to apply this airport analogy to BT. He talked a bit but didn’t actually explain this, other than saying that they’re transparent on osmosoft.com.
Edit: The Q&A is a “beat up the Microsoft guy” session. First question: Will Microsoft stop beating up on open source re: software patents? Second question: Samba was around for at least twelve years before Microsoft helped — can we expect this kind of behaviour in the future? Third question: OOXML standards debacle where MS used their power to buy national standards community to push through an inappropriate standard — can the open source people within Microsoft change the corporate culture? Fourth question: something about patents. Blah blah blah.
[tags]oscon, oscon08, mit, intel, microsoft, sun, bt design[/tags]
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