Thursday starts with a fairly interesting keynote about the
similarities between TCP/IP and containerized shipping. I didn’t
write down the speaker’s name or anything, but his basic message is
that these things aren’t so different: standard packets for shipping
variable content enables all kinds of efficiencies. This is cute but
I think only applies in a few situations.

Ruby on Rails

Next is a talk about Ruby on Rails. They’ve had 100,000 downloads
since their release, pretty cool. The Rails community either grew the
Ruby community 20x, or is 20x the size of the pure Ruby community (I’m
not sure which), i.e., Rails is their killer app. The basic idea
behind Rails seems to be that they have an object relational model
where the class and field names in Ruby code correspond directly to
the names in the database schema, therefore requiring less typing and
maintenance. This seems handy, though maybe limited in situations
where you can’t redesign your database to map to your UI model.

Kartik Subbarao, HP

Subbarao gives a very silly talk about “Venetian IT”, which is an
extended metaphor on a water/earth free/closed analogy. Goofy
metaphors are kind of a problem for the keynote track, and this one
even comes with a 4-quadrant chart showing the various combinations of
things… shades of Ken Wilbur. Subbarao is too enthusiastic without
a moderating seriousness.

Computational Origami

This is one of the three coolest talks at the show, based on my
metric of what I told non-attendees about afterward. I wasn’t all
that fond of most of his new
origami works; I thought they seemed over-done and somehow missed
the art. I suppose I prefer a simpler aesthetic in folded paper.

Mitchell Baker

The last keynote on Thursday is an interview with Mitchell Baker
about the new Mozilla organization thing. I’m afraid I wasn’t too
interested, though now the thought occurs to me that perhaps this is
an interesting experiment in how to fund free software. I did notice,
from talking to folks, that there really hasn’t been much evolution by
way of new forms of free software business models. The open source
java startups all seem to be focused on support — the old Cygnus
approach. (Business model innovation isn’t really our strong point in
this space, our strong point is more about lowering
inter-organizational barriers.)

Another thing she said is that they will make money via search
relationships. I found that a bit surprising; although it doesn’t
rise to this level of seriousness, my first reaction was that this was
a breach of trust with the free community. I still don’t have a
strong opinion about the relationship of free services to free
software. Maybe it suffices for the community to have a strong value
against service providers acting like asses. Or, maybe we need free
and open organizations providing services as well.