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.

I’m heading down to LA tonight for SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo. I’ll be volunteering at the GNOME booth in the Exhibition Hall, so if you’re in the area, stop by and say hi!

May ’07: Toorcon Seattle (BETA)

I wrote a separate post about this, see here.

July ’07: Ubuntu Live

I took the train down to Portland with Andy, which is so much more enjoyable than flying, I don’t even know where start. Unfortunately, Amtrak’s trains on the west cost are quite slow, and at least between Seattle and Portland, don’t have priority on the track. The trip home was delayed over two hours because the freight company was using the tracks, so we were stuck in the middle of nowhere for a while.

My happiness with mass transit continued after getting off the train, when I walked a few blocks from the Amtrak station and hopped on Portland’s light rail, which is absolutely wonderful. It dropped me off right in front of my hotel, across the street from the convention center where the conference took place. And best of all, this was all within the free ride zone. Chris and Steve arrived from California by air and also were impressed with the continence of the rail system, which took them from the airport right to the hotel, for under $3.

Fortunately, the first leg of light rail starts operating here in Seattle in 2009, and will eventually stop a block and a half from my apartment. More information on that here.

Onto the conference itself, there were some excellent keynotes, including Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Canonical/Ubuntu) and Eben Moglen (from the SFLC). Eben Moglen’s talked about GPLv3, and also encouraged everyone to shift their thinking from “open source” to “free software”. He had a very positive response from the crowd, which I think is great news.

There was also talk about the effect “web 2.0″ has on software freedom, specifically about how we’ve been moving from proprietary software on the desktop to proprietary software on the web. This time however, we loose control of who controls and has access to our data, not only the file format it’s stored in.

Chris and I are both irritated by all the attention web applications have been getting recently. We both hope developers will start writing great free desktop software again some day soon. The linux desktop should be innovative, NOT just the best shell to the web.

The sessions weren’t as technical as we had hoped, but we all certainly learned something new. Sadly, the BoF I arranged was a non-event, and I was completely blown off by everyone from Canonical.

Someone from OpenMoko had a booth at the vendor area showing off the Neo1978, and I have to say, I don’t like it. It’s rather big and bulky, but more importantly, the screen is inset from the case, which I find to be very unappealing. The lack of EDGE or WiFi is also a big deal breaker, and software is very unintuitive and clunky, but I see there’s good progress being made there.

July ’07: OSCON

I didn’t pay for any sessions at OSCON, but the exhibition hall was HUGE, and I spent almost half the day there. Intel dominated the floor with people demoing their new Thread Building Blocks framework (which looks very cool), as well as their new Moblin hardware platform (which doesn’t interest me at all).

Mozilla also had a solid presence there. Chris and I had a good chat with someone about XUL, which I still need to follow up on.

Sun was there, but I hope nobody else tried to use any of the computers they had on display, some very pissed off looking woman yelled at me and scared me off. Fortunately, I did manage to get some OpenSolaris DVDs before running away. I need to find time to install Nexenta and see what all the ZFS fuss is about.

July ’07: Facebook Developer Garage

At work, we developed a Facebook application, so I figured I’d show up and represent.

There were three people from Facebook who talked a bit about the platform and took questions/feedback from the crowd, but were all very careful not to talk about future plans.

The Facebook Platform is interesting to startups because it provides instant access to a huge user base, and has already proven to be a successful way to bootstrap a product.

Overall, most people were extremely excited about the platform, but at the same time, had complaints about functionality and features. The representatives from Facebook acknowledged everything that was brought up, but because of their policy to not speculate on the future, they made no commitments, and I don’t think anyone left feeling confident that specific things would change. I suspect a Windows developer would feel the same way having run into problems or limitations with their proprietary platform.

Although they claim otherwise, Facebook is a closed, proprietary platform, much like Windows or OS X. As a developer for this platform, you’re limited to a small set of functionality that could change underneath you any day, and may not work as documented.

Facebook is about more than social networking, they are creating a new type of operating system, much like Google has been doing with their online web-based applications.

Personally, I’m not ready to loose the freedom to tinker with applications that I use, or have my data stored online (and possibly owned) by a third party. If this is the case, I’ve lost my freedom, and might as well go back to using Windows.

August ’07: DEFCON

I’ve been saying I’d go to DEFCON for a few years, and this time I actually made it! Just about everyone I know was there, so it would have been a very boring weekend in Seattle had I not. Generally I enjoy the social aspect of conferences more than the talks themselves, and DEFCON offers plenty of other things to do besides attending talks all day. Some friends got second place in the aCTF contest, next year I look forward to being more active in both that and the badge hacking competition.