September 16, 2025
Keeping tech free
OSCON wraps up, as it always does, with its closing remarks, a short talk — this year by Simon Wardley on “Situation normal, everything must change” — and the annually awaited O’Reilly Open Source Awards, which had five winners this year.
The five are…and because no one else will say it, I will:
The OSCON goes to…
On the last morning of the last day of the last OSCON in Portland, things seem remarkably upbeat. Though resigned to the fact that they’re losing the home-field advantage for having the largest FOSS expo in North America, many Portlanders still feel that OSCON will be back someday. Officially, O’Reilly is focused laser-like on the Austin event in May 2016 — among the increasing number of O’Reilly events here in North America and elsewhere — so 2017 is not even on the radar yet.
While Larry Cafiero is up in Portland having himself a merry auld time at OSCON, I’m in the sweltering heat and humidity of North Carolina, normal for this time of year, with dreams of All Things Open swirling through my head. ATO, because it’s the next conference I’ll be able to attend — and because it happens in October, when the weather around here is much more tolerable.
While Larry’s been keeping an eye on things at the self-proclaimed most-important-open-source-conference-in-the-multiverse, I’ve been keeping an eye on the happenings in the FOSS world elsewhere. In the process, I’ve managed to make Larry part of this Week in Review.
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
I’ve said this before: Going from FOSS expo to expo several times a year is like following the Grateful Dead from gig to gig, or to help younger folks understand it, following Phish all over the place and ending up at Bonnaroo.
Like many of the Linux/FOSS events that dot the calendar year, OSCON resembles that — Bonnaroo without the mosh pit (though now that I’ve written that, let’s see if something like that appears in Austin next year) — but along with the camaraderie there’s also an element of “high school reunion” in the mix.
PORTLAND, Ore. — My colleague Christine Hall beat me to the punch this morning about Capital One’s announcement on their open source development tool, but IBM and Hitachi also both made a big splash at OSCON today.
“Big Blue” unveiled a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. IBM plans to release 50 projects to the open source community to speed adoption in the enterprise sector and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile and analytics, among other areas.
The project is called developerWorks Open, a cloud-based environment for developers to access emerging IBM technologies, technical expertise and collaborate with a global network to accelerate projects. Developers can download the code, but also access various items like blogs, videos, tools and techniques to accelerate their efforts.
Software. It’s been a thing that has fascinated me for decades. As a layman, the fact that lines of gibberish can be aligned to make a computer do the things wanted or needed is almost miraculous and resides in the shadows between magic and science. I am almost childlike when being shown how that gibberish makes devices do their stuff…stuff I want to do.
What drives a person to do this? That whole “making my computer do what I want it to do” thing; how does a person even get their head around that in the first place? What was the specific moment in time when a person says, “I want to write software to make my computer do what I want it to do”?
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
Editor’s note: FOSS Force will be offering live video streaming of all OSCON keynote addresses beginning Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at noon EDT.
I was ready to pack my bags for OSCON on Friday with a pretty quiet week, and a quick roundup which would allow me to hit the road and head north to Portland. No such luck. We have OSCON coverage coming next week — more on this later — but some of the more scintillating stories of the week include the following:
FSF, Canonical Makes Progress on Licensing: The $140,000-plus in donations is still missing, but that’s not the biggest news coming from Canonical this week. After two years of wrangling between the Free Software Foundation and Canonical — with a little help from the Software Freedom Conservancy — the FSF announced that they have made some progress on updated licensing terms for, as the FSF calls it, “Ubuntu GNU/Linux.”
Anyone who has read FOSS Force for the last couple of months knows that I lost my voice to cancer and that I’ve become personally involved in getting a decent text to speech (TTS) application developed. Some of you have reminded me that there is a good assortment of text to speech applications for Linux, especially in the mobile market, such as Android and the iExperience. Granted, for both examples, but we are needing an application that can either come preinstalled or be easily installed on almost any Linux distribution. That leads us back to the plentiful choices within the Linuxsphere you feel the need to mention. Yes, there are a lot of them, but when it all gets boiled down, they all share one simple trait.
None of them even approach usability for the everyday computer user. None. And you would think that of all these choices, one of them has to work…or provides documentation reasonable enough for everyone. You would think.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
Money: Can’t live with it, and can’t live without it. OK, maybe you actually can live with it, but money seems to be the overriding theme this week when it comes to FOSS news. With this being payday for most of you, try not to spend too much mental currency on some of the developments this week, like:
MS Writes a Check: Well, this was probably inevitable. With a generous donation, Microsoft has become a gold contributor to the OpenBSD project — the first gold contributor — in an effort to get OpenBSD’s help in porting OpenSSH to Windows. This comes from a report on ZDNet, where Steven Vaughan-Nichols tells the tale of checkbook participation in open source as “the best option…for our team to adopt an industry proven solution,” says Microsoft’s Angel Calvo. A gold contributor writes a check for anywhere between $25,000 to $50,000, so even at the minimum, the OpenBSD Foundation scores big. In exchange, Microsoft gets to port OpenSSH, which arguably is the gold standard for remote administration. Of course, it isn’t revealed how much, in code, Microsoft is going to contribute going forward, but as long as the money is there…I guess the money is there.
I was planning to have an easy Tuesday, but then I got wrapped up in Reddit. But not just any Reddit topic — this one was special; as many of them are, of course, but let’s just put that aside for a second.
Reddit had a topic in r/Linux entitled “Should I /make/ my kid use Linux?” And because I have, um, a “history” with this topic (e.g., I have a child and she does use Linux and free/open source software, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News), I am going to go out on a limb and say the following:
Encourage your kid, by all means necessary, to use Linux? Absolutely, because he or she will want to use it from the start.
The Reddit topic is worth a read. If you haven’t done so already, go there now. There are a lot of good posts, but my favorite is from someone with the handle Robsteady, who says, “TL;DR Don’t MAKE them use it, just set them up so they grow accustomed to that being what gets used. Raise them in it instead of trying to change them to it eventually.”
