Today is the last day, and the keynotes were quite a bit more interesting than previous ones. First off was the CEO of Linden Labs, the creators of the amazing alternative world/economy/lives Second Life. It was cool to see the new tech coming to SL but I thought his points were rather vague and basically obvious. The founder of Wikimedia was next, talking mostly about how important it is that Wikia, an open source search technology, is to the world and how important it is that search and its data is “open.”
Simon Wardley was originally slated to give a speech about the open sourcing of Zimki, but as the owning company decided against OS, he gave a very witty and duck-oriented speech on why commoditization of infrastructure and IT is so important. I thought this was brilliant and not often said enough: every company spends way too many resources on solving the exact same issues (what he referred to as yak shaving), from networking and server processing power to email and file sharing. We should be pooling our resources into what is basically a grid. Nat Torkington, the conference chair, gave a cute set of keynotes on the psychologies of various open source conferences. And then James Larsson demonstrated some very novel and dangerous uses for older hardware, from an electrocuting monitor-based mousetrap to a leather fetishist’s version of Pong.
