OSDC2006 Keynote - Randal Schwartz (Merlyn)

Randal Schwartz (RS) gave this 1st keynote of the OSDC 2006 conference proper, he talked about his personal experience with various licensing schemes over his life IT/evolutionary experience, from early exposure to pay-for OS and tools, to shareware, to BBS systems, to tools like EMACS where he 1st encountered the spirit and culture of open and free source and the GPL, to tools like Larry Wall's 'rn' news reader.

These later tools were his awakening to the hard work developers put in to fulfil a personal need or solve a problem, but subsequently offered for free to others to meet their needs. He also experienced the joy of contributing back to the project and seeing his own patch appearing in credits and benefiting others. This experience is common to most in the room I suspect.

He briefly outlined and compared various licences, GPL, LGPL, BSD, ASL, and the "dont use for evil" kinda ad-hoc licences like "don't use this for millitary use" , he distanced himself from the more fundamentalist FSF approach (ala Richard Stallman), but also emphasised the danger of a totally liberal public domain approach (where the default would be total copyright application to author in absence of any other license declaration)

The talk was pretty much preaching to the converted really at a conference like this. He mentioned that he spends about 2hrs a day supporting the community in IRC and on mailing lists answering questions which is nice to hear, and he encouraged others to do the same if they're not comfortable contributing by coding.

RS mentioned a quote (I think I've heard before) regarding usenet along the lines of "Those who didn't grow up with Usenet are doomed to repeat it" , taking a dig at the plethora of web-based forum products of today. He shared a couple of funny anecdotes tho which only someone as well connected as this possibly could.

One involved the Gamma release of Perl 5.0.4 which was loudly claimed to be ready for final release and would not be patched. RS bet a friend that he could sneak another feature in, fibbed to the Pumpkin that Larry had told him a certain feature was required (use of -> to reference anonymous list elements ?) and the change was actually made.

See Also: OSDC 2006 | Web Development | Notes Index

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