the possibly accurate nowSun, 26 Jun 2005
[15:47] LUGRadio LIVE - Report
Date: 6/26/05 at 11:47PM
LUGRadio Live 2005 happened this weekend (Saturday 25/06). My report on what was there and what I saw follows (yes, it's all me me me, it's a blog goddamit):
I was all organised and had everything together and ready so all I had to do was get up at 0615 , shower and head for the Tube. I got there and made my connection at Euston station with no problems. 2 hours and 46 uncomfortable minutes later (you get what you pay for with the ole £18 return ticket) I alighted in Wolverhampton. I was just on the verge of congratulating myself for the eminient smoothness of the travel arrangements when I realised I had absolutely NO idea of where exactly I was going in Wolverhampton! I tried wandering around in the vague hope that I'd either bump into it or I'd come across an internet cafe. I didn't. Forty-five minutes later I realised that I had a couple of the podcasts on my MP3 player and I slowly FFWD through to the annoucement of the location. I got there only an hour late and got into some serious llistening. I managed to check out:
- Rufus Pollock - Digital rights and freedom campaigner
Had some interesting things to say about the various open source licenses and their various interactions with each other. Also touched on the new OpenSolaris licensing and warned of possible linux "contamination" leading to potential SCO like legal action in the future. He also made some interesting points about free software and the government. He pointed out that schools are THE place to get Linux in because getting the mindshare of the children is going to be what gets Linux into the position of a contender rather than an annoyance to the major powers. He also pointed out that winning market share from those who CAN make a choice is not really helping. Those who can make choices about what they want to run are probably something like 5% of the overall OS market. Schools and government offices are what needs to be aimed at.
- Mark Shuttleworth - Founder of Canonical and the Ubuntu project and part time space-man.
I found this to be one of the most interesting talks. He gave the talk whilst playing a slideshow of photos taken by and of him when he was training and IN space. The talk segued through space travel whenever a photo caught his eye and Ubuntu development and philosophy the rest of the time. I remember when Mark did the space thing back in 2002 and I didn't really pay attention at the time because a) I had no idea who he was and b) I was busy thinking unhelpful things like "Goddamn rich people" and being jealous. He seems to be a pretty philanthropic kind of guyand he further fired my ambitions to do something for the OS/FS/Linux community this year. He also followed on with the school theme and talked briefly about his SchoolTool project. Basically a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source licence.
- Bill Thompson - Tech commentator and BBC journalist
This talk drew some interesting parallels between the Madrid bombings on the 11th of March 2004 and the Open Source community. He pointed out the difference between the American reaction to the 9th of September attacks ("Who did this and where are they so we can do it back") and the Spanish reaction ("Who did this and why did they do it? What can we do to stop them doing it again?"). He then moved on to how Open Source software was used to provide a website including registraion and pre-registration functionality, high turn-over forums in three languages and a certain degree of privacy - all in three days. Bill said the the slideshow was available on his website but damned if I could find it.
- Ian Bell - Co-creator of 80s classic game Elite
This was an interesting talk in that the presenter seemed seemed very much drained by the subject he was talking about. There are documented troubles surrounding this attitude but I still felt really sorry for him. He was obviously very smart but just seemed to be over everything.
- Kevin Carmony - President and CEO of Linspire
This guy is pure PR genius. I played with the first couple of versions of Lindows when they came out but I've done nothing more than read news stories ever since they became Linspire. I must say that purely going off what he said I'm definietly up for another look. Although his distro is probably not what I'm looking for it might be a very good stepping stone into the Linux world for Windows people I'd like to move over (people like my parents for instance). He pointed out that a lot of the work they are doing with Linspire is getting hardware drivers for Linux in general. They are big enough to be able to deal with companies like Via, Abit, Nvidia, Asus, AMD and get drivers out of them. He also explained that everythign that is developed at Linspire to make their desktop more useable is given back to the community that owns the original base product.
- and, of course, Jono Bacon, Ade Bradshaw, Stuart Langridge and Matthew Revell doing the live recording of LUGRadio late in the afternoon!
Of course I also got some cool free stuff:
- An O'Reilly pocket Etch-A-Sketch
- An O'Reilly Developers Notebook (basically a little book full of grid paper)
- A boxed copy of Linspire with a 12-Month Click-and-Run license
- A RedHat Europe cap
- A CD with all the LUGRadio episodes to date, signed by all the presenters of course (yup, I'm a sad fanboy)
- A 12 month subscription to Make magazine (I scored that by travelling the furthest to get to the meet).
- The latest Ubuntu and KUbuntu releases on CD
I'd like to plug Make magazine just briefly. It's a new offering from the O'Reilly company and I really like it. I bought the two available copies before I got the subscription because I really enjoyed my brief skim through them. It could be that they just happen to be paralleling my current side project (building a magentic swipe card reader - Make's take on it here) but there seemed to be plenty of other stuff to interest the hardware hacker - sort of like 2600 but without the social commentary.
I think the best thing I got took away from this event (apart from masses of swag) was the re-enforcement that Linux is more about community than anything else. All the really cool people who gave up their time to talk at this event which, lets face it, isn't exactly world-shaking, without being paid anything at all embody the spirit of what the Open Source community is all about. They came, they talked about what they give to the community and none of them put themselves up on a pedestal. If you wanted to approach them and have a chat, you could!
Although on the face of it it might be nice for all of the talent available to work on one distro and perfect one desktop manager and one application suite the reality is that all of these projects inter-operate anyway. If someone comes up with a bright idea you'll see it spread around soon enough. Without the choice the community becomes no better an option than what is offered by the proprietry "Do It OUR Way" OSs.
I get more dissilusioned with private enterprise everyday and I really hope that I can provide something useful to the world - no matter how fleetingly - rather than tapping my blood for some vampiric leach who cares not for the quality and elegance of the solution so long as they get paid.
Vive la resistance!
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