We didn't get to see much of OSDD, as we were relaxing most of the day. We did, however, see most of the discussion about licensing and legal issues. Linus Torvalds and Marc Andreesen did not make surprise appearances, though VA Research and Netscapewere represented. Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, John Ousterhout of Scriptics, Larry Wall, Eric S. Raymond, and others in the open source/free software business led the town meeting.
There was quite a bit of tension in the room between different ideas of licensing between the GNU General Public License, the BSD license, and the Mozilla Public License. Tim O'Reilly likened the differences to the differences between rebel factions in Monty Python's Life of Brian (e.g., Judean People's Front, People's Front of Judea, etc.) who hated each other, despite the fact that few people knew the differences between them, if indeed any existed. A similar comparison has often been drawn with the BSD variants.
Nevertheless, RMS asserted that non-"free" software is worse than no software at all, and seemed to attack Ousterout quite a bit during the day (who adopted a hybrid licensing scheme for Tcl). Earlier in the week, and during OSDD, Wall advocated looking for cooperation and middle ground.
