It's been (and looks set to be for the forseeable future) a time of conferences and workshops.
A few weeks ago, I attended the LinuxExpo at Olympia (just 2 short minutes on foot from the office - gotta love London life). It was good - I got a chance to chat to a few people, including Alastair who was doing a great job manning the Gnome stand, and a few Debianistas including noodles, which took me right back to the good old days of ALUG.
The event itself was a bit of an odd one though, with the Linux part tucked away in a corner of the larger CreativePro Expo and MacLive Expo. If Gartner are saying 85% of businesses have adopted Open Source, you'd expect a stronger showing. I can only assume other Linux events are attracting all the attention.
And, indeed, that certainly seems to be the case: last week I had the oppportunity to attend the Olswang Open Source Summit, which was oversubscribed with more than 120 folks coming along to hear all about Open Source. Most of the crowd had some involvement in law, as you'd expect given the hosts.
A few things caught my attention. Firstly, Adam Burrows (Associate General Counsel, Symbian) asserted that when the Symbian OS is fully open sourced, it could be the largest open source project in the world, with in the region of 40m lines of code. Obviously it depends on what you class as the project (and LOC is a notoriously dodgy measurement), but to put it in perspective: the linux kernel is around 5.2m lines of code; OpenOffice is around 10m; Red Hat 7.1 is around 30m; Windows XP is around 40m; and Debian 4.0 is around 283m lines of code. So whilst not the largest, Symbian is certainly big - and getting to grips with all that code is going to be a real challenge for their developers. Not to mention - why is a phone operating system bigger than some desktop operating systems?!
Heather Meeker of Greenberg Traurig LLP did a nice roundup of the various foundations out there, including Free Software Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Python Software Foundation, GNOME Foundation, Software in the Public Interest, The Open Group, Eclipse, Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation. As an Apache member, I was particularly pleased to hear her refer to the ASF as "the bellweather or hallmark of how to manage Open Source projects".
I was however somewhat disappointed by the presentations from IBM and Microsoft.
The IBM presentation was somewhat like a FLOSS talk from five years ago: no real insights, rehashing the same tired old arguments and focusing more on scoring points against Microsoft than providing useful content. C-, must try harder.
The Microsoft presentation held no surprises: it was a typically disingenuous but cleveer tale of half-truths, twisting facts and figures to confuse the audience. Just a couple of examples include the claim that Microsoft have "always been widely interoperable" (no explanation was given for how their proprietary undocumented binary file formats were ever interoperable), and the howler "we have 80,000 Open Source projects running on Windows". The implication was that Microsoft themselves are developing these projects - it may be true that there are 80k projects that happen to work on Windows, but I suspect it's completely untrue that they come from the Microsoft stable. Indeed, a quick look at Microsoft's Open Source Project Community, CodePlex, shows just 6618 projects at the moment. The most disappointing aspect of all this is that Microsoft have some genuinely good news to shout about - for example clearing their developers to contribute directly to Apache projects - and yet some speakers still rehash this duplicitous nonsense, forcing us to rebut instead of support.
So: it was a good afternoon with some interesting conversations, but next year I'd hope to see the big companies really raising the bar.
Posted by savs at November 18, 2008 3:57 PM