I can’t believe I’ve only posted 4 times since the last OSCON and one of those was vacation pictures.
Anyway, it was a great conference again this year and I had a ton of interesting conversations with people. Rather than recap the sessions I hit, here were the memes I observed.
Open source has “won”
Several people hit on the topic that open source has become so widespread that it has “won”. It seemed that there was a sense that open source has become accepted to point where it doesn’t need to be “evangalized” and instead just needs to be executed. Or maybe it is that there are enough examples where open source works that it has now proved itself to be a viable model. In any case, I found it odd to hear this mentioned so often.
Open source licenses are obsolete
Tim OReilly said OSS licenses are obsolete in his keynote and this was widely misinterpreted by other presenters. Several people took this to mean that licenses aren’t important or even that the open source part is irrelevant. The message I got from Tim was that using software licenses that apply during software distribution are less effective in a world where systems are distributed, but the software isn’t. I heard this as a call to arms to work on new ways besides licenses to set the rules of collaboration.
Open Standards and Open Data
There were several calls for people to start a conversation about what “open standards” and “open data” mean. The OSI has kicked off an initiative to define an Open Standards Requirements for Open Source. It will be interesting to see if an equivalent of the open source definition can be applied to Open Standards to bring more consensus to its meaning. Defining Open Data will probably be even trickier.
Working as a community
This might have been based on the conference agenda or just the sessions I hit but there seemed to be a greater emphasis on how communities work than I’d seen in previous years. Danese Cooper ran a great Lightning Talks session on community where her talk was on how to run Lightning Talks. Definitely something I could have used earlier this year.