View and vote on the article here: zZine Interviews: Nathan Torkington
zZine Interviews: Nathan Torkington| Category | | | Summary | | For sometime now the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2003/) has been doing more for Open Source than we can imagine. The original idea of Nathan Torkington it has been providing us with debates, exhibits, discussions, |
| | Body | Welcome, let me start by asking what is your name?
Nathan Torkington
What do you do?
I'm an editor for O'Reilly and Associates. I also put together the tutorials and sessions for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, as I've done since its early days as the Perl Conference. Outside of O'Reilly, I'm involved in the Perl 6 project and the Perl Foundation.
What is the O'Reilly Open Source conference? What does it stand up for?>
We're a large conference of developers who use open source. It's the community gathering for open source advocates, strategists, programmers, developers, and technical staff.
For how long has it existed?
This year's (2003) was the 7th, so we have a lot of history.
Why did you wanted to start an Open Source Conference? Whose idea was it?
We had been doing a very well-received Perl Conference. Tim said "there are probably other groups within the Open Source world who have the same need to find each other, put faces to names, and share their latest work in person." (In fact, it was at a summit held in conjunction with one of the Perl Conferences that the term "open source" was born)
Q: Was it hard kicking off such project? Didn't you fear that it could become somewhat of a "flop"?
The definition of failure was if the developers didn't like what we were doing. So far that hasn't happened! Financially, I'm lucky to be able to work on the content of the conference and have other people worried about whether it loses money or not.
It was certainly hard to do. We were pulling together many different technologies: MySQL, Apache, Python, Java, ... under the one tent. At our largest, I think we had 13 or 14 parallel tracks to plan, going for three days. The scope of the conference certainly made it hard to do. But it also made it fun--I've had the chance to meet brilliant and interesting people (usually as I beg them to speak :-).
Where was the conference last held?
Portland, Oregon. We move it around every few years. It's been in San Jose, Monterey, San Diego, and now Portland. It'll be in Portland again in 2004. We really enjoyed our time there--lots of very supporting tech people, a fantastic downtown location that put us right beside restaurants and bars, and as a bonus, there was a Blues and Jazz festival playing outside our hotel windows when we arrived this year.
How did the general public relate to the conference? Did you have a large audience? What were the main interest points in the conference?
We typically get around 2000 people at the conference. The interest points are always the technology, although sometimes there's a great show on the side (for example, the year we had executives from Microsoft and Red hat debate). We try to be a boot camp for your brain, so you can learn about tools to help you do your job better, and also get wind of what you'll be using to do your job in six months' time.
>The attendees are generally developers and IT folks. We have had summits for the business side of things, and last year we worked with the OSCAMP folks (http://www.sao.org/oscamp/) to bring businesses who didn't have past open source experience into the open source world.
Yes, Why should a company make their products Open Source?
Well, OSCAMP wasn't just about open sourcing a company's products. There's a lot of middle ground, from simply consuming open source products ("company X uses Linux!" is the cry we've all heard, as companies take this first step), using open source development technology and processes within a company for faster and cheaper development ( CollabNet is an example of a company that sells this kind of know-how).
The question for a company, when it comes to open sourcing a piece of their software) is whether that software represents their edge over the competition. In most cases, companies develop software as an afterthought, not as their primary function.
For example, a lot of Wall Street finance companies each develop the same Java-based software tools. These tools don't give their traders an edge; they're just the baseline tools every trader has to have. So there's an effort afoot to get these companies open sourcing their tools and pooling their talent for lower costs, rather than independently reinventing wheels.
What do you foresee for the 2004 Conference?
We're still in the planning stages for 2004. But obviously there are a lot of interesting things happening in the Open Source world: SCO's ongoing stupidity, the battle for government mindshare, the growth of Mono and emergence of an open source ASP.NET implementation, the interest shown in Parrot by various open source groups. There's a lot happening, and we'll have no shortage of talks. As always, my biggest problem will be finding room.
What were the Conference's greatest ?achievements? over time?
It's impossible to pick. Watching contestants eat bugs for points in the Quiz Show (dried, flavoured bugs, packaged for sale as food, I hasten to point out) was one of my favourites. The Microsoft-Red Hat debate was something I'm glad we had. We've tracked Mono since it was a gleam in Miguel's eye. We were Damian Conway's first step on the road to being Larry Wall's #2.
I think the thing I'm most proud of is that we've managed, year after year, to be a place for people from different projects to meet and exchange ideas. Most every technology has its own conference now, but the danger of only going to those conferences is that you only meet people who agree with you. This leads to dangerous inbreeding of ideas. At OSCON, we have Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, C# folks meeting over lunch. Linux and FreeBSD followed.
Do you think Open Source might not be getting the attention it should from several computing sites, communities and fans?
It's hard to say without knowing which sites, communities, etc. you're thinking of. The only group I can think of that I'd like to see take open source more seriously is Microsoft users, and to be honest, open source advocates haven't given them a lot of reason to look at open source. Microsoft's always painted as the enemy of open source (rightly or wrongly), and this carries over to Microsoft developers. They paint it as "us vs. them".
That's a shame because open source could make a huge market gain by winning Microsoft developers. I know Microsoft's been actively recruiting from open source developers for years now, turning advocates for open source into Microsoft wage slaves. It'd be nice to see that start to change.
Do you think M$ should turn their Windows into an Open Source Product? Don't you think it could be dangerous with all its vulnerabilities? Do you think we cold get better windows modified versions made by the general public? Do you think M$ could become threatened by the existence of better windows versions than their windows?
(I think the problems in Windows are so systemic that it would take years if not decades for open source developers to figure out the source, refractor, and improve, and doing so would almost certainly break the backwards compatibility that is the reason Windows is such a crock of crap to begin with) I don't think Microsoft will ever open source Windows. It's one of their major assets, where a lot of their income comes from. Their active policing of licenses via the Business Software Alliance (BSA) shows that. Frankly, I think Mac OS X has shown the way to go: take a reliable platform (open source in this case) and build your proprietary goodness on top. Most open source hackers I know would rather have an OS X box than a Windows box.
How would you define Open Source?
I follow the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org) definition. Well, actually I try to. In reality, I'm lax. I use "open source" when I should say "open source and free software" (in all my responses so far, I should have said "Open Source and Free Software"). I thank Brad Kuhn and Richard Stallman for keeping me honest. We've talked about changing the name of the conference, but the reality is that we present free and open source software together at the conference already, and changing the name would only be confusing at this point.
Well that is all for now. I hope all of you have enjoyed this interview.
This interview was conducted by: PaPaParleone |
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