The first ever All Things Open conference in Raleigh, North Carolina is now history–but it’s history that will repeat itself. At the sendoff after the last workshops had finished, Conference Chair Todd Lewis announced that the event had been a bigger success than expected, with something like 800 in attendance, and that the event would definitely be returning to the Old North State’s capital city in 2014.
The three presentations I was able to attend at the afternoon session started with “Open Source Communities in a For Profit World” led by John Mertic, a Solutions Architect for SugarCRM. Although Mr. Mertic is a personable enough person and his presentation was well thought out, his ideas were a bit disturbing to this dyed-in-the-wool open sourcer. I’ll save the whys and wherefores for next week’s in depth look at this workshop. Suffice it to say, right now I’m hoping that when I review his presentation I’ll find I misunderstood some of his ideas.
I was very pleased, however, with Matt Dugan’s presentation, “In Defense of Vendor Mistrust.” A Middle Solutions Architect for Shadow-Soft, Dugan was on target with the reasoning behind his conclusion that in most cases enterprise users will gain in the long run if they move to open source. Again, I’ll be writing a more detailed account of this workshop in the days ahead.
Finally, I attended the exposition on containerization given by Josh Barratt, the Chief Architect for the premium hosting company Media Temple, which was recently purchased by GoDaddy. This was a fairly technical talk aimed at developers. Although much of this discussion was slightly over my head, I left with an understanding that was clear enough for me to see the potential of containerization. More to come on this as well.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
