I went to the gym again in the morning, foolishly lulled by the good feeling into thinking that working out was fun. Damian corrected that. Yow I hurt!
The big crisis today was that Guido van Rossum, the Python creator, had a family emergency that prevented him from attending. This came at the last minute, and we've been working hard to come up with a plan to deal with it. We'll have a conference call, and David Ascher and Paul Prescod will present. See, this is what I have to put up with--problems with Python are now problems for me! Oh how sick and twisted the world has become!
I spent the day in an Open Source Summit, organized by Redhat CTO Michael Tiemann. Tiemann is very cool. I thought Jon Orwant was the only cool person with a three-letter job title. Michael is pretty cool, too. The meeting was long, and full of interruptions and cross-talk, but it was still interesting to attend.
We had some common memes arise. One was cooperation, not only between various open source factions, but also with free software (GNU), and in some cases with commercial companies who want to use open source.
Another was that the world is moving more towards services, where source code at either end becomes less important. More important is the ability to write code to implement a service--IP issues like patents, licenses, and trademarks are being used to lock out open source developers (who don't have a ton of money).
And finally, we talked about what we all found interesting. .NET, web services, and portable Linux all made a mention. Nat from Ximian said he was very upbeat on desktop open source. Not necessarily for your grandma, but for companies like Ford who are replacing expensive Windows systems with much cheaper open source.
Larry's State of the Onion was brilliant! He did a series of 55 second lightning talks, one per Apocalypse chapter. He was hilarious, and ended on-time. I could hug him! The mp3 is here.
I'm now in Jon's Quiz Show, which is (as usual) hilarious. I'm mp3ing it and they should be up tomorrow.
--Nat
