Monthly Archives: July 2008

iPhoneDevCamp 2 this weekend in SF

iPhoneDevCamp2The iPhone 3G was launched on July 11 (only 20 days ago) and Apple sold a million units in the first 3 days. I got my 3G on launch day. And this time the lines were even longer (cheaper phone, more demand) while unlucky customers faced a network infrastructure jammed with simultaneous requests to set up AT&T contracts for each phone. Despite initial difficulties, iPhone fans persevered and got their shiny new objects.

And those fans who hack are ready for this weekend’s iPhoneDevCamp 2 in San Francisco. This year’s organizers — Raven, Dom, Chris, Blake — have done a phenomenal job pulling in sponsors and handling logistics, volunteers, speakers and developers.

Developers, testers and hackers will gather at Adobe’s offices tomorrow to start designing and building code for the iPhone and iTouch through the weekend. They’ll use the iPhone’s SDK as well as web technologies to build cool iPhone friendly apps. A hackathon contest will be held on Saturday and Sunday (August 2-3) to promote open source community values of sharing, contributing and openness while churning out some serious code. At the end of the contest on Sunday, each app will be demonstrated and qualified participants will win cool prizes. I can tell you from experience, the prizes are really neat (developers even won iPhones last year).

To top it off, the excitement doesn’t stop in San Francisco. With satellite events happening concurrently in Austin, Chicago, Colorado, Portland and Seattle and internationally in London, Paris and India (Yeh!) , this weekend will buzz with activity.

Can’t wait to see the fun begin tomorrow evening! See you there.

Open Source Open World at OSCON’08

OSCONNext week is OSCON. As this conference celebrates its 10th anniversary, there are a lot of cool happenings at and around the conference. I’ve been partipating at OSCON now for over 5 years and it has always been the hub of foss geeks from all parts of the US and beyond. It has changed its character a bit but not much. The hallway conversations, great talks, BOFs, awards, parties and the sheer number of geeks, geek-herders and wanna-be geeks (from companies who can’t avoid open source anymore) make the OSCON experience pretty exciting. This year promises to be fun again with co-located events such as OSCamp, an unconference from the 23rd to 25th occuring simultaneously at OSCON.

I’ll be part of a panel discussion termed “Open Source, Open World” and will be presenting a perspective on open source in India and its impact on India’s IT ecosystem. My fellow speakers will be Nnenna Nwakanme of FOSSFA Africa, Li Gong of Mozilla China, Bruno Souza of JUG, Brazil, Harshad Gune of GNUnify, India, Martin Michlmayr of HP, Europe and Rishab Ghosh of UNU-MERIT, Europe. The world will speak through these panelists and it should be very interesting to learn what open source has done to transform the world in the past 10 years. Danese Cooper will be moderator.

It has also been 10 years since the term “open source” was coined and the OSI was formed. The open source community will be gathering at OSCON to celebrate these anniversaries. I look forward to the next 10 years of open source going strong and changing the landscape of software development in many more ways.

See you there!

Why Bloggers (Even Non-Programmers) Benefit from Participating in Open Source Projects

BlogHer 2008BlogHer 2008, is an annual conference that brings together bloggers from all over the world to confab under one roof. This year it will be held July 18-20 in San Francisco. Over 1000 women bloggers will gather together at this forum to talk and blog live about a lot of topics – from political opinion commentary to parenting, green eco-consciousness to travel, good blogging techniques to open source technology and blogging tools. Pretty cool, huh!

I’ll be one of the speakers at an exciting panel this Friday on “Why Bloggers (Even Non-Programmers) Benefit from Participating in Open Source Projects“. My fellow panelists include Mozilla’s Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker and Freebase community director Kirrily Robert. This panel will discuss why and how bloggers, programmers and even non-programmers can participate in open source projects and the benefits of participating in the open source community which shares a lot with the blogging world. Participation begins with an itch to scratch or a problem to solve and can be challenging as well as fun in open source projects . This interactive discussion promises to be interesting and I’ll blog more on my experience later.

Software-as-a-Service and your rights

As the Web becomes an integral part of our lives and culture, web applications are being used as online services at an unprecedented scale. Email, calendaring, social bookmarks, social news, photo sharing, video sharing, social networking, mapping are all applications that we use every day. Free and open source software is being used to build many of these new web services. But we find that most of these online applications are closed source and have turned waters murky in terms of ownership (especially when open source licensed software is used). Separation of usage and distribution of software has changed the relationships between software and users. Who owns what part of the software, who controls what part, what rights do users have and how do they protect them are just some of the questions that one has to deal with.

It’s great to see a new initiative “Autonomo.us” launched by a group of hackers and activists who are concerned about the effects by network services on user freedom. Some of contributors in this effort include Benjamin Mako Hill (MIT/FSF), Bradley Kuhn (SFLC and Software Freedom Conservancy), James Vasile (SFLC) and Luis Villa (GNOME Foundation, OSI Legal Advisory Board). The group is supported by the FSF and intends to serve as a forum to examine issues raised by network services and establish an “informed” position on software freedom and network services.

Learn more about the Franklin Street Declaration, and the Open Software Service Definition at autonomo.us.