[CLUE-Talk] OSCON report, Thur 7/26

[Tom Poindexter]

The 'greate debate' was held on Thurs morning, between Craig Mundie, Sr. VP of 
Microsoft, and Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus Software, and now CTO 
of RedHat.

Mundie started out with a short talke 'Informed Choice':
 - MS has no 'beef' with Open Source.
 - Open Source isn't the issue - it's a licensing issue (GPL).
 - The traditional model conserves the 'software ecosystem' of intellectual 
	ideas --> industry --> consumers --> government and back.
 - MS's Shared source license fosters relations with 
	developers.

Tiemann countered with:
 - (The Latin phrase of) "To be, rather than to seem." - Better to
	be open, not just seem open.
 - 'Ms's Shared Source sounds like the Alternative Minimum Tax - 
	it's neither Optional or Minimum.
 - Why does MS need to do this when they are already earning
	billions of $/year.
 - MS likes free software - as per Hotmail running FreeBSD.
 - Cygnus tried to partition it's company into free and commercial
	models, and Tiemann had to provide 'soothing' emails, so he 
	he knows when it 'smells bad.'
 - Everyone wins with Open Source.

The session ended with a panel discussion with 6 extra guest
panelist, including another MS developer.  The most
notable comment was that point that MS's 'traditional software
ecosystem model' doesn't allow for any other innovations outside
of MS's.

The rest of my day was spent in Tcl, XML, and a Perl session.  David
Box from MS explained how the SOAP specification evolved and forked from
XML-RPC.  Paul Welton demoed a nice 3-D editing package in Tcl.  Ben Adida
had a lnog session on porting Oracle SQL and stored procedures to
PostgreSQL.

The evening was spent with friends out to dinner, a BoF on public domain
mapping data, and a late night party by ActiveState.

Friday 7/26
I purposedly avoided the keynote presentation, a panel discussion
on 'The Big Hairy Problem' of getting Open Source recognized in
corporations. - Nothing their that's not already been said.

I'm heading back in the mid afternoon, so I'll probably hang out 
at the Tcl track, there will be presentation on Tcl used in
handheld devices, groupware, computer vision applications.



Hope these reports have been useful or at least entertaining
for the list.

-Tom

-- 
Tom Poindexter
tpoindex at nyx.net
http://www.nyx.net/~tpoindex/