Archive for April 12th, 2006

Posted on April 12, 2006 - by jono

Planet Advocacy and…advocacy

As some of you will be aware, I run Planet Advocacy, and you can read the combined wisdom of Linux advocates including Reverend Ted, Benjamin Mako Hill, Dave Neary, Zak Greant and others. Tim Joyce mailed me to be added to the site, and he is now on there, and it made me think that we need some more of you Open Source advocating nutters on there. So, consider this a formal invitation – if you blog about how to get more people using Open Source, let me know and lets get more and more interesting content on Planet Advocacy.

In related advocacy ramblings, the good people over at Nottingham LUG videod my On the Front Line: Convincing People the Inconvincible talk, and you can go and see it here for the main talk and here for the Q and A session. You can also see photos from the event on Barbie’s site and as well as Michael Erskine’s page.

So, make a difference right now. We need more and more people to help out doing good, balanced, objective Open Source advocacy – it really helps to push the Open Source message.

Posted on April 12, 2006 - by jono

Microsoft Summit Day 1

Well, here I am in Seattle. After hours of travelling and virtually no sleep over the last two days, I am finally checked in having attended my first day at the Microsoft Technical Summit. This is a three day conference in which an invited audience are put in the same room as prominant Microsoft bods to provide feedback, opinions and thoughts. These kind of conferences are interesting, particularly for someone such as myself who spends his days pushing competing technology. I think there is lots for us all to learn.

OSS Watch Conference

This all kicked off on Monday when I travelled down to Oxford to speak at the OSS Watch Conference. The talk I gave was The Open Source Reality Check and it seemed to go down fairly well. The conference was an interesting one to speak at as there was a real mix of visitors and experience. This comprised of academics, businesses, technical people and more. There was an interesting array of questions after the talk, and the continued discussion over tea and coffee was also interesting. It is always great to talk these issues over with people, and there is still so much to learn from everyones experience and views.

After the conference I jumped on a train and headed down to Heathrow. It was then seven hours or so to Newark, and into a Holiday Inn at the airport. After about three hours sleep, I was up at at 4.30am for a shower and off to the airport. I ate some questionable breakfast (I have no idea what half of it was) and then it was off to Seattle. Five hours later I jumped in a taxi and headed straight to Redmond, tired but intrigued to get started with the event.

Microsoft Technical Summit: Day 1

The Microsoft Campus at Redmond is huge. Really, really huge. Despite its obvious size, the thing that really strikes you is how comfortable it is. Redmond is a very laid back, loose and inspired place. It must be a pretty interesting location to work at, particularly if you are a hack-by-the-seat-of-your-pants developer with a taste for Mountain Dew.

Today there were a number of interesting talks, including Bill Hilf talking about Open Source, Rick Rashid talking about Microsoft Research and Don Box talking about Windows application messaging. Each of these talks happened in a single track in a room attended by around 50 or so people. The people attending are a combination of developers, competitors and system architects.

Bill Hilf gave a great session, predominantly dominated by Q and A. I like Bill Hilf – he provides a refreshingly honest perspective. There were a number of occasions when he would pass his own opinion and sometimes he simply confessed to not knowing the answer about something. The content covered a number of areas, and Open Document Format and OpenXML triggered a lot of discussion. There was also an interesting debate between Bill and Brian Behlendorf about ODF and patents. I think part of the problem with the perception of OpenXML is that Microsoft have taken their usual approach of developing an all encompassing standard in-house which should then be accepted by others. Openness doesn’t work this way – if a technology is designed to encourage open adoption, there needs to be a public consultation process. Now, I am not entirely convinced that Microsoft intend OpenXML in this way – I suspect they are primarily intending for it to be an open standard from the user’s standpoint. The other point to bear in mind, and one that was covered in the session, is that Microsoft have a long legacy of software and versions that the format needs to support, and ODF does not even come close. But, this is part of the problem – instead of stepping to the side and improving ODF or developing an open format in conjunction with other organisations (akin to HTML), the in-house approach seems to be used. I do understand why Microsoft have taken this method, but it does not really fit in with the concept of openness. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think ODF is perfect either – ODF needs to become much more than Sun and IBM. There is just way to much politics here; IBM and Sun don’t trust OpenXML because of Microsoft, and Microsoft don’t trust ODF because of IBM and Sun. We need a community driven, collaborative foundation with support from all of the above. Then again, I need my bank account to be flowing with millions, and that ain’t gonna happen either.

Rick Rashid is the head honcho of Microsoft Research and gave a stunning talk. Microsoft Research are doing some deeply, deeply cool things, and the technology they are working on includes, but is not limited to all the Minority Report wizardry showcases around the web. A particularly impressive example of this other research was how they can pull an object out of a regular image. As an example, he showed a picture of a dog in front of a tree, and the software could pull the dog out and faithfully replace the area behind the dog in the image. Interestingly, this kind of research is deployable to most people and has an obvious consumer benefit; the research is not just pie in the sky kind of things. He also stated that their research efforts are often linked around the future costs of IT. As an example, he told us that LCD panels will be cheaper to produce in the future than whiteboards. This naturally means LCDs can be used for this research technology. There was also lots of demos of interactive projection – such as projecting an interface on a table and being able to interact with it in different ways. I have taken away a lot of thoughts about this which I plan to write up in more detail later.

Don Box gave an interesting talk about messaging in Windows. Although I only understood about 20% of what he was going on about, I really enjoyed his fun and personable style. Like Bill Hilf, he was honest and down to earth, and it made for an interesting talk. Not much to say; remember, I only understood about 20% of it.

Afterwards we took a trip to the Microsoft Museam for some drinks and food and then off to the hotel. I am now going to get some much needed sleep. I can already feel it setting in…