eric’s extremeboredom

I had a great time at SCALE, here’s a wrap-up of some of the things that went on:

• The first day had two tracks all about open source in healthcare. Speakers included Scott Shreeve (co-founder of Medsphere, and founder of Crossover Health) who gave a very motivating talk about the importance of transparency in healthcare, and how open technology can revolutionize the U.S. system (or current lack there of). A marketing executive from Medsphere spoke about the company in general. Christian and Fred Trotter didn’t go easy on him, asking many direct questions about Medsphere’s past attacks on the open-source community and the lawsuit against the founders and unknown members of the community who downloaded the then-release source code. The guy basically knew nothing, I hope Fred will post more information on GPL Medicine or his blog in the coming days.
• Due to a miscommunication, the GNOME event supplies box didn’t make it out. We made a late night run to Kinkos and printed a huge banner, posters, and fliers. Thanks to Rosanna Yuen for her help on IRC figuring out what was going on (sorry for coming off as a stalker!), and to everyone who worked on the GNOME Marketing Materials. The “Happy People” poster was a big hit.
• A group of developers and community members from Foresight Linux were at the booth next to us, it was great to meet and talk to them. Conary is a very interesting package management system, and I certainly plan to learn more about it.
• Since we didn’t have the computer from the event box, Christian brought in his dual display quad-core desktop. He has both of his monitors rotated 90°, and we’re fairly sure that more people came by to talk about that than GNOME. By the end of the conference, the Gentoo folks across from us had done the same with their case-modded strangely mouse-less computer.
• On the second day of the expo, Jeff Schroeder (another fellow GNOME volunteer) and the Foresight folks got there before us, and didn’t have the computer’s password. They asked the Gentoo guys for a Live CD so they could reset it. They asked what operating system the computer was running, and after hearing “Ubuntu”, their response was “FAIL SAUCE”. Of course, their Live CD completely failed to boot so Jeff got a Live CD from the Ubuntu booth which worked perfectly. He returned the Gentoo CD. Ehm, what was that phrase? Ah yes…FAIL SAUCE.
• While standing at the booth, I got a random message on AIM. Since there was nobody coming up to the booth to talk to me at the time, I thought I’d try to engage this person in Linux conversation, which sadly fell on deaf ears. Here’s the log, what do you think? Pedophile trying to cover his ass, intoxicated cop, Chris Hansen, or really a clueless highschool student?
• Christopher Blizzard from Mozilla as well as a few other people expressed interest in my D-Bus Javascript bindings, so I’m going to try to find time soon to answer everyone’s email on the dev-platforms-linux mailing list, and get an initial release out there. If anyone is interested in helping out, please let me know. The bindings make it possible for XUL application and extension developers to interact with D-Bus services, allowing for deeper integration into the Linux desktop.
• It was incredible how many companies in the expo hall were there promoting closed-source proprietary software. I was especially irritated with the folks from Promise, who didn’t even understand why someone might possibly want an open/free API for querying health information of their RAID hardware. Ironically, their booth was next to OpenBSD and across from the Free Software Foundation.
• There was someone from HP trying to raise awareness about their commitment to linux/opensource. I’ve been very impressed with their open-source printing/scanning software (scanning over the network using XSane works!), so I was happy to see them support SCALE. However, the web interface on the neat little linux-powered NAS device he had on display is not open source, I hope this changes in the near future. Also, although I wasn’t told anything specific, I’ll be watching the news for an announcement about HP laptops preloaded with Linux later this year.
• I had a good chat with one of the Inkscape developers. One of my questions was if there were plans to use a docking library instead of having so many floating windows, and was very surprised/impressed when he showed me that it had already been implemented, and is coming in the next release! Although I’m not an artist myself, it is exciting to see free graphics software continue to improve, the next release will be a big step. Now if only GIMP would hurry up and follow suit…
• The booth to our right was run by a family business called RANDR that develops and maintains open-source business software. Very cool to see what they’ve been able to accomplish, check them out!
• Thanks again to one of the guys running the PostgreSQL booth for letting me borrow his laptop power cable!
• A single person recognized the Toorcon t-shirt I was wearing on the second day of the expo.
• Lastly, I direct your attention to this photograph which perhaps depicts Sun’s true commitment to Linux.

While I absolutely had a great time, I found that very few people hadn’t heard of GNOME, and there wasn’t all that much to say to most people about it. Common questions were people wondering what’s coming in the next release, how to properly pronounce “GNOME”, and of course, why choose GNOME over KDE.

Running a booth and being involved in projects is absolutely the best way to get the most out of conferences, and I look forward to having a project of my own to show off at future expos. We were also tossing around the idea of having a hacker booth with bean bags chairs, music, and soft lighting, etc. where people can work on stuff and learn about open source software development.

Photos from Jordan and Kevin.

Categorized as Technology, Conferences, Open Source