O’Reilly Radar at Oscon

This is the second year that Oscon has included a one day conference-within-a-conference called O’Reilly Radar, intended as an executive level briefing session on new open source or related technologies. The agenda includes a wide range of topics reflecting the broad interests of Tim O’Reilly and his gang of folks who blog at O’Reilly Radar.

Although this year’s event did not re-capture the excitement and intimacy of the first time around, it was still a great day. The audience was slightly larger, perhaps 150 or so, but the room was much larger and the speakers were on an elevated stage. Although this is standard procedure for large conferences, it has a remarkable impact on the dynamics and participation of the audience. It made it much less spontaneous and engaging. I observed many in the audience had their laptops open doing email (or worse, blogging!) during the session. This seems to be endemic to many conferences lately; so I can’t fault the O’Reilly team for a decreasing attention span among conference goers.

Tim’s opening remarks were excellent, as usual, with analysis as to what enables projects or products to take hold in the market place. Cory Doctorow’s presentation was a highlight as he discussed the ways in which freedoms are being eroded by the use of technology and gave examples of how we can encourage young people to, ah, fight back. Cory has a book called “Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother” coming out next year which sounds fascinating.

I also enjoyed an on stage discussion between Matt Asay from Alfresco and Mike Olson from Oracle (and the former CEO of Sleepycat, which Oracle acquired.) Mike made some good points about how closed source companies such as Microsoft and VMWare are good at building community and low-friction business models and open source is just one tactic.

While that’s true, I think that open source remains an important element of creating a disruptive business model. It’s not the only way to create a disruptive business model, but it’s a pretty good one. Matt Asay made the point that unfettered access to source code provides benefits to all users by ensuring ongoing development and innovation. In other words, everyone benefits from the fact that the source code is open since many programmers will enhance a product. I don’t know if that applies to all software, but we’ve certainly seen that model work well for Eclipse, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perly and other products. Tim then followed up with a short chat with Marten Mickos from MySQL.

There were also excellent panel sessions on scalability, on Facebook, on Firefox extensions, on open source hardware and various short “showcase” presentations on ohloh.net, OpenAds, openCV among others. These were short VC-style pitches (10 minutes) and quite well done.

The only disappointment was a session I had been looking forward to called “Licensing in the Web 2.0 Era” as a chat with Eben Moglen and Tim O’Reilly. Eben is normally a brilliant speaker who is passionate, articulate and convincing. In his session he was none of the above and came across as a rather under-appreciated if not embittered lawyer who was tired of other people making money while he was out protecting our freedoms. Eben has done a brilliant job on GPL 3, but if he intended his remarks to be a wake up call to open source developers as to the importance of the freedoms protected by the GPL, then he failed completely. What could have been a rallying cry became a diatribe and a somewhat embarassing personal attack on Tim O’Reilly.

But that’s just my interpretation; maybe I missed something going on here. You can also check out Chris Marino’s view on his SnapLogic blog “Eben Moglen Wacks Tim O’Reilly,” or this report from Robert Kaye “Eben Moglen Berates Open Source” and from Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier “Eben Moglen Challenges Tim O’Reilly to Join the Conversation.”