O'Reilly Open Source Convention, 26-30 July 2004 - Portland, Oregon

by Stuart Yeates on 4 September 2004 , last updated 14 September 2005

Introduction

Overview

The Open Source Convention (OSCon) is one of the oldest, largest and best known open source meetings. Organised and sponsored by O’Reilly—a publishing house specialising in open source and related technical books—it attracts a wide variety of open source developers, managers and users. The five day event runs the whole gamut from 700 seat plenary sessions to tutorial sessions, from presentation sessions to narrowly focused birds of a feather sessions.

This year’s OSCon was held in Portland, Oregon, a hotbed of open source activity. Portland is famous for its multi-vendor consortium called Open Source Development Labs which employs dozens of key Linux developers, testers and porters, and also for a deep penetration of open source into both the k12 and the post-compulsory school system and active user groups.

OSCon has always been a convention for developers, their managers and evangelists who ``speak the language’’ of open source, but this year there was a noticeable scarcity of non-programmers and end-users. There were corporate evangelists from IBM, Sun, Novell, BEA, Intel, and many lesser-known companies, promoting their companies as open source friendly. Microsoft sponsored a lunch, but tellingly had no publicly identified representative in attendance. Many of the grass-roots attendees were obviously relishing being surrounded by such a large number of like-minded people, particularly those from companies or institutions with an ambivalent attitude towards open source.

Plenary Sessions

The plenary sessions were mainly focused on the blue-sky visions of open source, inspiring attendees to look for open source in novel places and look at open source in novel ways. Several speakers discussed the “law of conservation of attractive profits.” That is, when a market becomes commoditised, the level above it becomes the attractive market and the level below it “bounces back” a little. Open source driven commoditisation of software could lead to several markets becoming significantly more attractive, including those requiring a critical mass of data, users or connections.

Ebay, Amazon and Google were seen as big winners. They managed to achieve critical mass in their respective markets with their standing being protected by the network effect—new contenders to the market are unable to attract customers because most of the value offered is derived from having customers and the incumbent already has an overwhelming number of customers.

Larry Wall, who has spent the last 30 years creating the Perl language, gave a contrasting plenary in which he discussed his on-going ill health and set out an explicit power structure capable of guiding Perl without him. The plenary was the single best attended event of the conference and the developers’ devotion to him was evident even as he hands the reigns of power over to the not-for-profit Perl Foundation. It was good to see the torch being passed so publicly from Perl’s creator to a new generation of developers with such public acclaim. The Perl Foundation is similar to other not-for-profits used by open source projects to make the transition from a lone-developer mode of operation, to a group of developers lead by a recognisable lead, and finally to a group of developers working by consensus.

Groklaw organised a moot on the current SCO vs IBM case. Since the lawyers involved are unable to make public statements due to rulings by the trial judge, prominent lawyers were bought in to argue the case and run the moot. SCO’s side of the case began with SCO’s valuation at the time of float (1 billion $US) and it’s current value (60 million $US) and named linux / IBM as the reason for this (the burst of the dot com bubble was not mentioned). The IBM case was a structured decomposition of the SCO arguments. Unlike the SCO case, the IBM case actually quoted from the relevant contracts and documents.

In the discussion after the moot, the original Novell/SCO contract of sale was seen to be systematically flawed, and open to re-interpretation by a court. It was also agreed that open source developers need to be much better at documenting their code, which has indeed already been happening in relation to the Linux kernel.

Tutorials

GPL Compliance for Programmers by David Turner from the Free Software Foundation was a step-by-step guide to compliance with the GPL software licence. The content reflected David’s main role dealing with front-line compliance issues with the GPL and LGPL licences for the foundation. In many ways the tutorial covered similar ground to the OSS Watch IPR and Licensing workshop. The tutorial was sold out, which is a very good sign. The notes are available on the web.

There were a number of technically oriented tutorials. Best Practice Perl with Damian Conway was a discussion of how classic software engineering principles applied when developing in a large, heterogeneous language. Jabber Boot Camp with Ryan Eatmon and Peter Millard was a walk-though of the philosophy, design and use of Jabber, an open XML standard for instant massaging. Subversion: Version Control Rethought with Greg Stein from Google was a discussion of the design principles of the subversion version control system, led by one of its key developers.

Sessions

Several managers and developers from Sun, representatives from the Free Software Foundation, and many Java developers turned up to hear about Sun’s sometimes ambivalent position on open source Java. The core problem was quickly introduced and recognised by all parties—the Java virtual machine is not under an open source licence and the Java language is not an independent standard. Sun’s position was that most of the Java developers aren’t driven by open source, they’re driven by compatibility, the much heralded write once, run anywhere capability. The independent Java developers took comfort from the fact that the Free Software Foundation’s efforts to build a GPL licensed implementation of Java are starting to bear fruit in the form of the GNU compiler for Java and GNU Classpath.

How to convince your manager to use Open Source with Stormy Peters from Hewlett-Packard addressed the evangelism of open source within large organisations. It stressed that understanding the business case, identifying allies and their relevant skills, talents and status and being up front with risks and disadvantages were all key to changing the organisational attitude to open source. There was a strong implication that selling open source on the basis of its philosophical, moral or engineering benefits is unlikely to be successful in an organisational context.

Peter Korn from Sun presented an an in-depth walk-though of Java and GNOME accessibility. Many developers never see the tools and techniques in use, but the tools rely on every developer “doing the right thing” when coding, so Sun is keen to remind developers of their importance. Peter also discussed the ability of open source software to comply with various national and local accessibility guidelines and gave a number of specific cases in which java and gnome accessibility had been used to improve the lives of individuals.

Birds of a Feather Sessions

Birds Of a Feather (BoF) sessions are small, participatory groups discussing narrow topics. Run in parallel with social events they only attract those with a genuine interest in the topic at hand.

The Open Source Software in Education BOF was, understandably, dominated by the American k12 educators and education support people. Much of the discussion centred on politically driven initiatives in the US and the impact these were having on schools, particularly those teaching minority languages. The various translation efforts to translate open source software were seen as a major boon.

The Software Patents BOF was somewhat overshadowed by the earlier SCO moot and poor scheduling, but attendees agreed that software patents are potentially a significant threat to open source software and all creation of software outside of the protection of a large corporate entity.

I also attended a keysigning BOF, an event at which developers exchange cryptographic public keys to enable them to communicate securely with each other at a later date.

As with many conventions, as much was gained in the venue corridors as the formal events. Serendipitous (or at best semi-planned) meetings of developers in hundreds of minor open source projects occurred, allowing their developers to strengthen bonds already built on mailing lists and IRC channels. Some of the things I discovered between sessions include:

• Open source is being used (or at least considered for use) in the US Department of Energy / Department of Defence. There were several individuals from the these departments who were resisting attempts to pin them down as to what they did, suggesting that they work in classified areas.
• The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative have written a primer for choosing open source software in a nonprofit context. This great guide is written in straight-forward language and many of the issues and steps discussed apply equally to the education sector.
• Portland Community College is advertising an open source themed programme. They teach Linux, MySQL and Perl accreditation courses alongside those in Windows, Oracle and VB.NET.
• O’Reilly were giving away security books, apparently to improve security within the open source community, which is already a differentiator between open source and propriety software.
• PostgreSQL are promoting their open source database using the Open Source Maturity Model, a methodology for describing how mature and stable a piece of open source software is.
• The Joint Astronomy Centre, a UK research council (PPARC) funded group, has a policy of releasing all of their software under the GPL.

Conclusion

OSCon is a large open source convention, perfectly suited for open source developers and technical managers to network, share experiences and catch up with new projects. The technical tutorials are a great place to learn about emerging tools and techniques and the Birds of a Feather sessions really do have something for everyone.