Day three is the first day of the conference sessions. We've got notes on the next Perl conference, the day's keynotes, announcements from Sun and the perl porters, and various awards.
Andy Hertzfeld of Eazel (and formerly of Apple) gave the morning's keynote address, "Open Source and the Personal Computer Revolution." He discussed the history of PCs, Bill Gates, the Woz, copy protection, and the various events in the personal computer movement that led to contribute to the open source movement. He went over some of the key moments in the open source movement, including the old recounting of the Hacker Ethic, and put forth his own addendum to the ethic: "the coolest thing of all is to have millions of people using your code."
Following that, a representative of Sun announced that the company has released its office suite, StarOffice, under the GNU General Public License. They also opened the OpenOffice.org site. For more information, check out the links on Slashdot.
Nathan Torkington gave out the conference awards for Best Web Application (My.University, by Nathan Bailey, Andrew Bromage, and Andrew Creer), Best Technical Paper (perljvm, by Bradley M. Kuhn), and Best New Module (Template Toolkit, by Andy Wardley). The Larry Wall Award once again went to Damian Conway for Text::AutoFormat, and he has withdrawn from future contention for the award, which will henceforth be known as the Damian Conway Award. Each winner received $1,000.
Update: 07/26 02:38 AM by P : Oopsie. Actually, the award will remain the Larry Wall Award, and the Best Technical Paper award will be renamed the Damian Conway Award.
Speaking of awards, on Tuesday night (our complete Tuesday wrapup is forthcoming), brian d foy presented the White Camel Awards, sponsored by Perl Mongers and O'Reilly. The White Camels, granted to people with significant non-technical contributions to Perl, were granted to Elaine Ashton for Perl user groups, Chris Nandor for Perl community, and Nathan Torkington for Perl advocacy. Each winner received $3,000.
Torkington then announced that the next Perl conference would be held in San Diego, CA on July 23-26, 2001, and noted that the call for papers is beginning now (we will post a link when we have it).
Larry Wall's latest State of the Onion was on the topic of music. He played dozens of instruments, from the dulcimer to the sticks to the violin. He, as is his way, did what no one else really could do: liken Perl and its culture to music and its. He noted that the difference between a violin and a fiddle depended primarily on what class you call the method from. Then Larry talked about Perl changing, with development efforts beginning on Perl 6, a complete rewrite of Perl (see other story).
The one paragraph abstract is available on the oreilly site.
BTW, it is worth mentioning that they said that Damian isn't eligible for further rewards at his own request
Thanks, Skud. And for the record, we didn't even offer have to her any of the $1000.
