DivaBlog

My Notes on what was said (your mileage may vary and apologies for no links and potential misspellings). -Danese

Tim notes that OSCOon attendance is growing (again) perhaps its an indicator the industry is coming back (applause)!

Tim says O'Reilly doesn't publish books...they try to capture knowledge from the people who are inventing the future. Sometimes that's a book, sometimes its a conference and sometimes its pure activism. "The future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet" - Gibson. For example, CarPC Hacks (an upcoming book) describes what some people are doing now in custom car mods (which we expect to see coming from Detroit in 10 years).

OReilly has been publishing more books about Google and Yahoo and other web implementations. He used to say at OSCon that OSS should want not to replace Microsoft, but rather to become the "Intel Inside" of the leading edge. Clay Christiansen, who wrote the Innovator's Dilemma, talks about commodization of software as a migration of value to different levels.

History of personal computing a la Christiansen...His law of "Conservation of Attractive Profits" meant the API lock-in at the software level alllowed hardware to be commoditized. Open Source tried to break the software lock-in, but Tim thinks all we enabled was a lock-in above the data level (data is proprietary). Lock-in was achieved by "Network Effect" meaning that the massively connected market only needed one provider of each service.

Tim thinks the Internet is the platform now. Apps are built on top of open source underpinnings, but are not themselves open source. Open Source (as we know it now) is less and less a solution. Source + Compliation != Application anymore. You could give someone all the source for Google, but you'd still have to run 100K servers to match the Google experience. O'Reilly has been pushing to have Google and Amazon open up APIs, but Network Effect makes it darned hard to level the playing field.

Getting your users involved in the product is key (Amazon gets its users to contribute content and that makes them feel ownership of the tool and enhances the value....MapQuest is commodity software on top of a commodity database and according to Tim they've stopped growing and are being copied. Tim says if they'd figured out how to get their users to make the service richer they would have dominated. Navteq is a company Tim is watching that IS working on getting users to add value (they are about to IPO - wanna bet Tim has fnf?)

So, takeaways...Data is becoming the new frontier. Start thinking about how to build a participatory layer around the data.

-Free and Open Source doesn't guarantee freedom when applications depend on network effets and data lock in more than software secrecy.

-It is key to invite users to build services and data, not just code.

-Think beyond Linux. Its the whole stack!

-Open Questions: Who will control the data in the future, Who will control the namespaces? Who will win the stack integration wars?

Switching Topics, Tim showed Microsoft's connection tool (called Wallop) that give a visual picture of the social network. Suppose Google put GMail and Orkut together? They would control the data, which is a huge deal now.

Call to Action!!! F/OSS needs to "Napsterize the Data"! We need to own our own data at least. We need to think about layers of access (private contacts, public contacts). The Network is the fundamental platform for applications. Think about Federated Identity Systems. Look at what Apple is doing with iSync (its a huge potential control point for them). Look at MoveOn.org, which no matter what your politics might be must be recognized as a leading edge of the Napsterization of Democracy (expressing the voice of the people).

Switching topics (again) Sofrtware Above the Level of a Single Device - (quote by Dave Stutz)

Look at iTunes and the iPod. Its seamless integration. The music store web backend and the small device iPod are elegant. A system designed from web to hand. Rendezvous (oops, ZeroConf) is cool! (Note that Tim really hates the new name, OpenTalk). Rendezvous Tutorial yesterday yeilded a Ruby port. Keep an eye on this!

Another interesting thing...Nat Friedman's Dashboard. Written in Mono, Nat has the idea of "CluePackets" that enrich your working environment

Firefox is finally revitalizing the Browser Wars.

Mobile (Tim showed MobileWhack blog for example) is interesting...watch this space (noteworthy mention of Python on phones)

O'Reilly Safari is an something Tim hopes you'll look at. They are annoucing an affiliate program for Safari, giving commissions like Amazon does for selling accounts, exploiting the new Web Services API (you can search Safari from inside Eclipse). They are adding special services for academics. Generally they are trying to make the Safari experience more particpatory. Think this is a great way to do Corporate documentation. Want also to talk to people who are working in developing countries (contact Tim if you have any ideas).

Network-enabled Market Research. He told the story of asking Gartner and IDC about Open Source and got back the answer, "Our customers aren't asking for it yet". What kind of Market Research waits for customers to mention trends? Tim showed a visual map of the book market. Java is the biggest topic in the tech book market, but notice Ruby is growing as a topic. In terms of book sales...Java, Visual Basic trending down, pHp rising, also C# rising. He showed visualization of the market by locale as well. Interesting to see who is buying/reading what -> where!

Finally an announcement that O'Reilly will be co-hosting the next MySQL Developer's Conference next April