Here are some notes from the sessions I attended Friday…
Linux is not ready for the desktop – Asa Dotzler
Asa had a nice call-to-arms for making Linux more user friendly. One point he hit on was how at Firefox they have intentionally limited options to keep things simple. The keep-it-simple (for the user) message echos from the Ruby keynote.
Open Source Biology – Drew Endy
Drew talked about how the biotech folks are working in ways similar to the OSS communities and hitting many of the same issues. Since DNA is basically the same as code, it can be reverese-engineered, patented, etc. They even have the equivalent of a SourceForge at parts.mit.edu.
Open Source Licensing Issues – Tony Gaughan
To me, this was the most disappointing keynote of the confernce and really stood out against all of the other presentations. Tony, from Computer Assosciates, spent half the time telling how Ingres was the database in the upper right of the Technology/Economics quadrant and how CA had the best approach. Tony, if I want to hear this, I’ll come by your booth. When he finally got around to Licensing, it was mostly a justification of why CA made a vanity license. CA has obviously done a good amount of thinking about licensing and it would have been interesting to hear about all of the pros/cons, not just the conclusion that HP felt applied to them.
Danny OBrien – On Evil
Brilliant presentation. To me, the best was when he showed how Ruby was able to shortcut Ghandi’s Ignore/LaughAt/Fight/Win state transition diagram and go straight to win.
Advanced Groovy – Rod Cope
Rod had a sweet demo where he showed how to launch Excel, create a chart, and then hook up/export the chart to a live Swing app in about 15 lines of code all done from the Groovy shell. Pretty amazing.
Rod also said that OpenLogic has 100k+ lines of Groovy in production in their product.