Kevin's Weblog

I was a bit late to the keynotes this morning, but I got there in time for Nat’s talk, which was a bit sad, as he announced this is his last year as the program chair for OSCON, but also a bit inspirational as he gave some advice on family dynamics to all the various open source communities gathered at the conference. After that, James Larsson talked about how to “Pimp Your Garbage”, demonstrating some pretty insane things you can do with your junk (and also demonstrating a slightly disturbing obsession with leather boots).

After the keynotes, I went to back-to-back talks by Robert ‘r0ml’ Lefkowitz. The first was on “Preventing Code”, about how businesses treat code like some sort of dangerous weapon that their employees must be prevented from using at all costs. An example: Windows security settings which prevent unsigned Excel macros from running, and no mechanism for employees to sign macros in spreadsheets they create for work. The second talk was “A Lexicon for Open Source”, in which he observed that people aren’t really sure what a lot of the terms we use in business mean, even though they are formed by combining words we do understand. He suggests that instead of using words which already have common uses, we should dig up archaic words which might or might not have related meaning and just use those, since no one knows what they used to mean and it makes you sound erudite to use them. For example, “reuse” has a common meaning which is really somewhat different from what we mean by “code reuse”. He suggests resurrecting “palimpset” for this use. Maybe we could call open source software “Chrysography”, while the alternative would be decretal software. In closing, he pointed out that contrary to the common claim that there’s no word in English which unambiguously means “free as in speech”, there is and the word is “liberal”. I guess it depends on your point of view whether it’s good or bad that that word already has strong connotations in our society.

The closing keynote was about “Open Source Hardware: A Start”, which might have been interesting if I hadn’t been starving. I’m not sure why they always run the sessions on Friday until 1:30 without any real food.