DivaBlog

Its OSCon time again. I'm flying up to Portland tonight and looking forward as always to a great conference. No matter what Sun UK employee Alan Burlison thinks, OSCon is still the center of the F/OSS Conference universe to me. This year lots of Sun folk are attending and several are speaking:

Simon Phipps is participating in two talks, one on Wednesday at 10:45am, the "Open Source Java Debate" with Tim O'Reilly and Eric Raymond on Open Source Java, and a separate session on Thursday at 10:45am called Open Source Software - An Industrial Revolution for the 21st Century"

Peter Korn is giving a great talk on Thursday at 1:45pm about the future of Java Desktop System. I saw this talk last month in Sweden and its really inspiring.

Members of the Solaris Kernel Engineering team are doing a BOF on Solaris 10 and Open Source, and they'll be giving away t-shirts and other goodies as well, to entice everyone to come on by before they go to the Free Speech party upstairs.

Other sessions of interest include Christian Cheline talking about java.net (which isn't on the schedule next, but I think its happening on Friday in the Products and Services track). Also we look forward to Chris DiBona's Java On Linux BOF, Louis Suarez-Potts' OpenOffice.org Workshop BOF and Bruno Souza's Java Libre BOF.

Hopefully if you read this blog and are going to OSCon you'll catch me in the halls or at one of these sessions to say, "Hi!".

Thanks to the many thousands of you who picked up my last blog (and of course also to those who contributed to the lively comments section). It was a fun ride, although I must admit I had no idea when I wrote it that it would be so popular. Tim Bray tells me that individual blog entries with readership draw above 20K are in the top 1%. Evidently even after all these years people still love to consider the Mozilla vs. IE issue. Hopefully my blog made some people try Firefox or some of the other non-IE browsers for the first time. Diversity makes a market strong.

I found the comments about the "coolness" factor interesting (...Has it become socially "uncool" to admit you use IE?...). Software taste has become conditional on the clique you're running with...so for instance at OSCon this week I'll be quite at home with my MacOSX-running Powerbook, whereas at GUADEC I got some heat for still not running Linux on my laptop.

Since I was in one comment accused of "lying" I'd like to concede again to Rob Scoble and others who counted more hands in the BlogOn audience than I was able to see. I promise that I only blogged what I saw (and heard).

Observers have been at pains for some time to point out that Microsoft software is so widely in use that we can expect its large share of use to continue for years to come (due to market inertia if for no other reason). And Microsoft is a smart company. They will figure out eventually how to show up in the F/OSS arena. Already we see them showing up as sponsors at every major (and many minor) F/OSS conferences worldwide. As a F/OSS advocate, I feel my job with respect to Microsoft is to help them understand why they need to create level playing fields and then to be vigilant in evaluating that they are in fact doing so.

And I'll bet that THAT stance will continue to keep me off the list of folks Microsoft is seeking to hire for some time to come.