Some 1,500 OSCON 2004 attendees were treated to literally hundreds of presentations. Some highlights:
- Tim O’Reilly’s keynote talked about the Open Source Paradigm Shift and said the network, not necessarily hardware or open software, was the thing. Here are some clips.
- The Stonehenge Party had over 1,000 people show up at Bar 71 in Portland. Stonehenge used 3 Linksys WRT-54gs flashed with Portless firmware to provide wireless access. One was plugged into the DSL line, the other two were linked via wireless WDS link, all sharing a single channel.
- Brad Fitzpatrick’s “Inside LiveJournal’s Backend” focused on high availability, scalability and growing web sites. LiveJournal started by cobbling together hardware from random sources here and there. Today, 90+ machines that employ a lot of fail over techniques and custom sofware bits that complement the off-the-shelf open source software that powers the rest of LiveJournal.
- Dana Moore is working on DARPA’s UltraLog project which is attempting to create extremely survivable software systems. The agent architecture for the system is built upon Jabber. The network is dynamically reconfigurable and can simulate attacks.
- Willamette Week reviewed Dan Gillmor’s “We the Media”
- Larry Wall’s State of the Onion” address was a hit (as always). Larry Wall, the inventor of PERL, overviewed Perl 6.
- SCO’s lawsuits were featured in a mock court, where lawyers presented the arguments of SCO and IBM to the attendees.
- BEA announced that two of its open-source projects, aimed at helping developers build service-oriented architectures, are making their way through the Apache Software Foundation open-source community process. BEA officials said the code for the company’s Apache Beehive project is now available to the public and its Apache XMLBeans project, which is aimed at helping developers simplify Java and XML development, has received approval as an official project of the Apache Software Foundation.
- SafariU is O’Reilly’s vision of XML-based books on demand. U design it. Search across the safari library to locate content, choose content as needed, even add your own material. Each section will show the number of pages and price ($0.16 per page).
Improvements to the desktop will require a greater Internet focus that enhances communication and collaboration, said Havoc Pennington, technical lead for desktop engineering at Red Hat at OSCon this Wednesday.
The ability for users to access their data anywhere; and the option of software as a service are essential elements, he said. You can find slides from the talk here: Creating a Desktop OS and D-BUS (sxi format). KDE and GNOME combine window managers with suites of applications to create comprehensive work environments.
Here’s a stick figure summary of the conference.
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