Good Presentations

As several other Sun bloggers have reported, there was an Open Source Summit held in the Auditorium at the Sun Santa Clara campus yesterday. Lots of presentations by folks internal to Sun and luminaries in the open source world.

To me, what makes a good presentation is something that is structured. It uses pictures as well as words. It combines the two together well. It doesn't drag. It's not predictable. It progresses. It makes a point. There were some great talks and there were um, some other ones.

The winner, hands-down for me was the talk given by Doc Searls. It was so interesting that it made me want to go off and read his blog afterwards. Not that he needs any more hits; according to Danese Cooper, he's one of the top 100 bloggers. The presentation, all 27 Mb's of it, touches on several interesting topics, including the architectural word set associated with software development, how the opposite of open source is closed source, not proprietary source (a common misconception).

Unlike some other great talks in the past that I've heard by Alan Kay and Roald Hoffmann which have been a veritable tour-de-force, there was always structure and a progression with this talk. I compare it with a couple stream-of-conscience talks I listened to yesterday which left me wishing the presenter had spent a little more time to at least put a couple of slides together.

Yesterday was also the first time that I'd heard the lightening style of presentation. The presenter is given five minutes to talk on whatever subject they like (bearing in mind that this was an open source summit). If they haven't finished after five minutes, they are "gonged" off, and the next presenter goes on. There is a skill to this. You really need to have thought about what you want to say, tried it out a few times, and got the timing down exactly. Some of the talkers had indeed done that and it showed.

My two favorites here were talks by Brian Behlendorf, who compared the Burning Man community to the way that some open source communities work - complete with gorgeous slides and the talk by Wilfredo Sanchez describing how he went about (almost single handedly) getting Apple to open-source their core BSD/Mach operating system (codenamed Darwin) in Mac OS X.

There was a "surprise" talk by John Gage right after lunch. John, as usual was very topical and very interesting. He talked about the bill that Senator Cain has just submitted based on the findings of the 911 report and the implications this will have on future government software purchases. All good for open source.

Finally, I want to direct your attention to an open letter by Steven Vaughn-Nichols on releasing the Solaris Operating System as open source. It's a pity that Mr Vaughn-Nichols couldn't have been in the audience yesterday to hear what's been done to make this happen. Perhaps he'll take the word of Glen Weinberg on it. Glen's team are going to make this happen. From everything I heard yesterday, it's clear that we are putting the infra-structure in place to make sure that when the Solaris source code goes "over the wall", that there will be a full development community behind it and that it will be useful to the people interested in it. There is also the need to make sure all the due diligence is done, both from a legal respect and a code review. This all takes time but its going to happen.

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( Sep 15 2004, 01:57:41 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink