Sessions at OSCON 2009 about Open Source

Wednesday 22nd July 2009

• With Software as a Service, Is Only the Network Luddite Free?

  by Evan Prodromou and Tim O'Reilly

  At OSCON 2008, Tim O’Reilly spoke in his keynote and in a follow-up blog post about the primary challenge now faced by Open Source and Free Software: the network service provider’s Software as a Service (SaaS). As referenced in Tim’s talk, a think-tank group formed in early 2008, called autonomo.us formed to consider how the Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) community should address this concern.

  So-called Application Service Providers, who provide SaaS, are now the rule rather than the exception in the software industry. The freedom implications of ubiquitous, high-bandwidth networking and AJAX-based application delivery are not yet fully understood nor adequately addressed by the FLOSS Movement. Even those of us who have been paying attention during SaaS’ rise remain somewhat befuddled by the freedom implications of the new environment.

  Our Movement must develop a multi-front response to this proprietary threat that will make the 1980s and 1990s battle against proprietary operating system vendors look easy. The challenge is specifically centered around two complex issues: (a) traditional user-freedom-protecting licenses (i.e., the copyleft) fail to protect the freedoms of SaaS users, and (b) even if users have the source code to the application they are using, they cannot run it themselves and generate the same network-effect available in the canonical instance.

  This panel discussion will frame and introduce the key questions introduced by these new issues. We will discuss the Affero GPL, which is one of few FLOSS licenses that address this concern from the software licensing perspective, and explain how our traditional FLOSS solutions cannot succeed as easily in this new network service context, and how developers must use server federation and distributed computing to overcome the new challenges we face.

  • Open Source

  At 10:45am to 11:30am, Wednesday 22nd July

Friday 24th July 2009

• Forking Encouraged: Folk Programming, Open Source, and Social Software Development

  by Yoz Grahame, Skud and jason douglas

  For decades people have been learning to program by copying and modifying other people’s code.

  How did you first learn to program? For us, it was by copying and tweaking simple BASIC programs on ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s.

  Folk Computing (a term coined by an MIT project which encouraged children to learn programming in exactly this way) has been a common factor in programming environments from LambdaMOO to Yahoo Pipes, the OLPC, Second Life, and more.

  We look at the history of folk programming from the 80s to today, and then examine some modern folk programming platforms.

  Some topics we’ll explore include:

  • Open Source licensing: the right to fork as a fundamental of folk programming
  • Programming in the cloud: how hosted development platforms lower barriers to entry
  • What other features are common to folk programming environments, and how can you spot one in the wild?
  • Case studies of modern platforms and their relationship to folk programming: GitHub, Ning, Second Life, and Freebase Acre to name just a few.
  • The issues, challenges, and lessons learned from building a folk programming platform.
  • Open Source
  • Social Software

  At 10:45am to 10:45am, Friday 24th July

  Coverage link slide deck write-up