Starting out bright and early again. I have a feeling Martin and Yannick might gang up on me for waking them up so early every morning and making sure we are on our way at 7am sharp, but it’s worth it. We did make it here for the keynotes.
The first session was Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy, by Eben Moglen. It was an interesting talk, but I’m not sure I share his views on the new, information-sharing technologies like YouTube. From his point of view, it is a voluntary invasion into our privacy that we’re giving these companies as they mine the data for information about us, which is then a marketable asset.
I believe that may be a minor side-effect of an otherwise great way to bring people and cultures together, to make this world a smaller place. I may be wrong and may regret all my information up there on the Web, and maybe I’m giving away something about myself by writing this blog, but I feel it is part of the process of information sharing. I look forward to an interesting debate on this.
The next talk is the Clash of the DB Egos, the egos in question being Monty “MySQL Co-Founder and CTO” Widenius, Heikki “InnoDB” Tuuri, Mikael “NDB Cluster” Ronstrm, Jim “Falcon” Starkey, Ari “Solid” Valtanen, Paul “Nitro” Whittington, and Mike “IBM/i5” Smith. It is interesting to see the creators of so many different, even competing, technologies up together, and the battle is mostly benign with more than a few laughs.
Heikki made “Most Memorable Moment” with his answer to the question, what would you like to see on your wikipedia entry 20 years from now: “Wikipedia runs on InnoDB”. Monty was given the title of the first “MySQL Fellow” (in the tradition of the “IBM Fellow”) and he got a standing ovation to the sounds of dozens of laptops falling on the floor as everybody stood up to honour him!
Bdale Garbee was next with Citizenship: Open Source Community Rewards and Responsibilities. It was refreshing to hear his thoughts on how the corporate world views the Open Source Community even as they participate in the process. Indeed, HP’s contributions are not trival, but the corporate world is still trying to wrap its head around the whole new open source paradigm.
And those were the keynotes for today. Off to the technical sessions now.
–Raj.
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