Thursday was pretty much Drupal day at OSCON. But, before that, there
were some very interesting keynotes. The Ruby on Rails one didn't
thrill me. The lead of HP's Linux initiative, Kartic Subbarao, was an
excellent speaker. He reframed the open/closed software in the familar
way (a 4-square
diagram) but with a different, more elemental outlook. Open source
resembled water; it flows and has no finite volume. Closed source
software is like earth, solid but not independently mobile. He also
described what happens when a closed source company adds open source
without opening up...you get a swamp (earth with restrictred water
flow). Ideally, companies should be like Venice, Italy. The land is
solid while the water continuously flows. Needless to say, I loved that
analogy.

Next was a speaker by the name Robert Lang whose specialty is origami.
My mind is, pun intended, still bending around that presentation. The
framing of origami within a computational context has created quantum
leaps in this venerable art of paper folding. I was in shear
amazement...what can be said.

Next was a brief interview with a hero to many in attendance, Mitchell
Baker. She is the President of the Mozilla Foundation, the foundation
that makes sure that Mozilla is protected. It was good to know how
viable and well Mozilla and, especially, Firefox ( my browser of
choice...you can get it at http://www.getfirefox.com . If you aren't
using it, you really, really need to be.)

The next presentation was, put simply, a trip. Dick Hardt, CEO of sXip,
talked about Identity 2.0. I never really thought about identity much
until I started researching sXip (there exists a Drupal module for sXip)
for single sign-on. It's a problem that I never really put a lot of
thought into. I really liked the presentation. I liked how Dick used
the slides as an aide, not a crutch, like some presenters.

I staffed the Drupal booth and walked around to the other booths. Of
special interest was the SugarCRM booth. I can't really put into words
what I think of Sugar because it does so much. Seeing it made me
realize that I need to go play with it and get it really going. Period.

Dries gave a presentation on Drupal which was quite well attended. I was
thrilled to see this. Drupal really is an excellent piece of
software...and I would like to work to make it that much better.

The Drupal BOF (pronounced "boff", stands for Birds of a Feather) was
interesting as it was most of the Bryght contingent, all of the
CivicSpace contingent and some strong users and contributors and some
new potential users. I got a real need to motivate myself to work on
things that need work. That is how communities thrive. Let's take the
example of a city. How livable would a city be if there was no waste
management mechanism?

I am versed in PHP and I am getting there in MySQL. I would also like
to get my PostgreSQL chops back to get PostgreSQL going better on
Drupal (I had some issues on my personal site with PostgreSQL, but
that's another story.)