LCA Friday
Today, Friday, was the last day of the LCA programme. Tomorrow is the Open Day which is the “real” last day I suppose.
I stayed up too late last night and consequently slept in this morning, missing the keynote on Python. Grr! However I reasoned that the keynotes have a much higher certainty than normal for actually getting video to appear at some stage, so I think it will be OK.
Here’s what I did see:
- Seeking is hard: Ogg design internals (note slides (PDF), video (Ogg)!) Very technical; well-presented.
- Stop in the name of law, or rather, “don’t stop”, since her message was more or less “just keep coding”. Notes at the end.
- None of session 3 seemed that interesting to me, so I went to FOSS for geospatial BoF. I was fairly out of my depth, it’s safe to say. :) I have merely idle curiosity, where as these guys were all pretty serious about it. They are setting up a chapter of OSGeo (Open Source Geospatial Foundation).
- Designing library APIs: How to make users love your library. While I’m sure the presenter has a wealth of experience in creating APIs, it seemed like he had trouble managing to get this information out, and it ended up being extremely general, which is less practically useful.
Then there was lightning talks. I hope the video of them surfaces, because they were quite good. 3 minutes was even far too long for some of them. Paul gave a great talk, perfect timing at 2’50’‘, talking about using Greasemonkey with Firefox and how you can use the script Myspace for unsocial fascist bastards to remove almost everything from the Myspace front page except for the login box. This received a well-deserved and resounding round of applause. :)
And LCA 2009 will be held in Tassie. Very good!
Then there was sitting around for ages waiting for the “Google party” to kick in, which was in fact the “Google barbie”, not party. It was OK.
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Whenever I introduced myself to people I would mention Wikimedia and excuse myself for not being that involved in FLOSS development. Then if we got talking about jobs I would mention I was using Prolog and people would be much more interested. I forget that 1) Prolog is really interesting because many people learn it at uni but few use it in industry, and 2) most people that come to LCA are geeks who find that OSS enables their geeking-out, as opposed to freedom-loving geeks who find closed source projects inherently uninteresting. I don’t think there is really a way for the project I work on to be open-sourced. It’s a nice daydream though…
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Notes on Kimberlee Weatherall’s legal talk:
- DRM is dead? Probably not – although the music industry is moving away from it, DVDs and pay TV will probably still use it.
- Global convergence on a few strong anti-circumvention (DRM) law models
- GPLv3 faces 2 tests, market (will it be used?) and legal (will it stand up in court?). Significant clauses:
- anti-DMCA clause
- anti-TiVoisation
- anti-software patents
- Software patents — too hard to kill now? Lots of investment in them – ~25,000 in 2004.
- Music industries now targeting ISPs rather than individuals. “Notice and terminate” (=“notice and disconnect”. You infringe, they tell your ISP, your ISP disconnects you.)
- Mentioned some org MIPIA? MIBIA? in Australia, I think like RIAA or MPAA?????
- Re: patents:
- Patent Pledges (patent “commons”) [I can’t find this. perhaps she actually meant Patent Commons.]
- Peer to Patent
- Public Patent Foundation – challenging bad patents
Given all the things going on I was a bit non-plussed that she still recommended everyone just sit back and code. But I would probably never make that recommendation, so perhaps it is not a fair comment. :)
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