New DivaBlog

Blogging @ JavaONE

For the duration of JavaONE I'll be blogging at http://weblogs.java.net/blog/danese/ and mirroring here. My good friends at O'Reilly secured me a pay-it-backward Miracle Ticket for JavaONE in exchange for blogging what I see. Such a deal!

FISL 2005

In Brazil for several days for the largest open source conference in the world, FISL. How large? Well, imagine 5,000 people attending content-rich talks with enthusiasm and willingness to contribute and join the society of Free and Open Source workers and you have some idea. It really is inspiring what's been going on in Brazil!

Here's a picture of a portion of the audience at the opening ceremony today.

Just a minute ago, representatives of DataPrev, part of the IT arm of the Brazilian Government, and my old company Sun Microsystems jointly signed the agreement to make Brazil a member of the JCP! Here the Harmony project is gaining a huge amount of interest, and the Javali part of Harmony has the full support of the Brazilian Government. Sitting here it seems we really will have compatible open source J2SE in my lifetime.

My congrats to my OSI colleague, Bruno Souza, who has been working towards this moment for many years.

The Sea Refuses No River

Listening to my former bigger boss while sitting with Simon Phipps at OSBC. For those of you who have never been in the position of supporting an executive in your company through a speech, its a lot of fun. For one thing you get to find out which of the memes you've been planting inside the company have "taken" (you get to hear your words played back to you through someone else's brain). Its an interesting feeling.

Executive presos are typically built by a team; each person only contributes one or two slides. I know it seems bizarre to think about executive presos as a piece of collaborative performance art, but that's what they in fact are my experience (and not just a Sun).

Today Simon had the pleasure of seeing one of his slides played by Jonathan (it was the one about how the Amazon river is really a whole bunch of rivers) for those of you who were there).

Come to think of it, that picture can also be used to explain the way change is influenced in a big company...If the ideas the company carries forward in its messages are a river, you'd better believe there are a hundred tributaries and feeder streams that represent people behind the scenes.

While we're at it discussing Jonathan...he's still having trouble melding his views on the ongoing value of securing patents with the F/OSS view that the software patent system needs immediate and serious reform if not abolition. I would love to see Sun and other open source companies coming out more strongly in support of software patent reform than Jonathan is currently willing to.

Simon wants me to say here that as he actually sees it there are really two issues relating to patents and open source. One is that the system needs reform and the other is that until it is reformed (and perhaps even after that) it is vital to the open source community that corporations be held to the expectation that F/OSS communites be indemnified against fallout from the way the system currently works.

My favorite quote from Jonathan (which is perhaps cogent to Simon's point above)...Welcome to the Age of Participation

Its a Commons, Man!

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

On the last day at eTech we were treated to the incomparable Larry Lessig speaking about the Future of Culture. He'll be at OSBC in early April doing a whole hour, and I highly recommend listening to him.

Also yesterday was also the "LifeHacks" talk. Cory Doctorow took better notes than I did. These guys are interested in helping make people more productive, and the talk focused on all the distractions that can come with some of the new technologies. I found myself disagreeing with much of their advice, however (although they did have some cool sites to talk about like 43 Folders) . Call me a weirdo, but I actually like having more than one thing going in my brain at a time. I am often seen knitting at conferences because it helps me listen for instance. So I have little friction from "context switching" on the computer or in my life (although increasingly my husband would take issue with that characterization). Okay, maybe I do need to focus more...:-)

Last (but not least), my pal Chris DiBona was there to launch the new Google open source site ! Chris and others have been working really hard on this for awhile and its so good to see it up and running. Open Source is just bustin' out all over the place :-)

And before I wrap up my notes on eTech 2005, I must commend my very good friend Duncan Davidson for his outstanding photo coverage of the event. It was so much fun watching him work (and checking the photostream to see what he'd captured). Hope he does a repeat in future!

But the absolute high point of Duncan's participation at this eTech (to my mind anyway) was his question to Larry Lessig. Duncan has been studying up on Creative Common's Licensing and he wanted to know whether they would develop a license that only grants rights to creative content to licensees who modify that content...except Duncan had a more shall we say graphic way to express it (and Larry's first response, "...I don't think I've ever heard it said quite that way...and if people choose to, ahem, do that with your content...that would be an interesting way to enforce remixing, yes..."). Duncan's an original all right :-)

And as long as Creative Commons is coming up, congrats are in order to the very cool Paula LeDieu who has evidently snagged the Executive Director job there. She'll continue to work for the BBC part time on the Creative Archive project that she has been directing for the last couple of years, which is a very good thin for them as well. Go Paula!

Make! at eTech

Floor space only at eTech the last couple of days...but its such a great conference that I don't mind sitting on the floor :-)

Last night was the Make! party at eTech. For those of you who haven't yet seen the fabulous Make! magazine, check it out.

So yesterday there were lots of opportunities to meet people who tinker. Like the fantastic Andrew "bunnie" Huang, and Natalie Jeremijenko from the Feral Robotic Dog pack.

The dog thing was perhaps my favorite thing from yesterday. Its not just a geek project, its an environmental activism project. As my only brother is an environmental attorney, I'm always interested in work that supports the Sisyphian task of fighting the good (environmental) fight. The modified robodogs that Natalie and her students build are fitted with a new nose that sniffs for environmental contaminants. They build a bunch of them and then release them into the "wild" at sites where people are concerned about pollution. The dogs roam around (on wheels...they are robots after all) and when they find pollution they stop and "do something cute". Some of them are networked as well and those send data back to collectors. How cool is THAT?

Sexnology

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

Just listening to Cory Doctorow speaking at eTech.

"...We eTechers are the rich hummus on the floor of the technology rain forest...we're the tiny frogs in the bromeliads."

You gotta love those images!

Best sessions from yesterday (for me)...first was George Dyson on "Von Neumann's Universe" telling us about the earliest days of computing at Princeton Institute, when Von Neumann and Kurt Godel were leading literally pouring the foundations for what we call the tech industry today. I'm a sucker for historical pictures, and this talk is chocked full of pics of people from that time (including a very cute picture of George and Esther as tiny children) and wonderful pages from journals and logs which were consigned to the archive where George works now. If you get a chance to hear him, by all means GO!

My other favorite session from yesterday was "How Sex Laws Incite Technological Change" by Annalee Newirtz from the EFF. Really fun and thought provoking session. I was reminded of my time at Apple working on QuickTime Conferencing. We were sure that videoconferencing via IP would really take off as soon as the porn industry got onboard. I loved the conclusion of this talk, where Annalee exhorted all of us to begin to support annonymizing technologies such as Tor (which she thinks will be increasingly useful for safely obtaining legal sex content in appropriately private ways, but which is even more important for people working to overcome opressive information control regimes). If everyone starts running and using annonymizers, then it will be impossible or at least much more difficult to kill freedom of information on the web. So you can do well (for the free world) by doing (yourself) good (as in Good Vibrations)!

I'll try to post more about todays sessions at some point.