Conversations are what it's all about...LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit
by anandeep on February 15, 2007 08:18pm
I am writing this from the Big Apple. The Linuxworld Open Solutions Summit is in New York and running from February 13th through February 15th. I questioned the wisdom of holding a conference in February on the East coast rather than the milder shores of the West Coast - since I arrived the middle of a snowstorm after a day's delay caused by flight cancellations. But once I got here the bright lights on Broadway dissipated all doubts!
The Open Solutions Summit is a much smaller conference than Linuxworld conference (which I covered in a previous blog). But it has many more IT professionals who show up than vendors. This makes for more OSCON-like ambience, except that it is IT focused rather than developer focus.
Microsoft held an evening mixer in the conference hotel (the Marriot Marquis) in the cool rotating restaurant on top of the building. The NYC skyline was spectacular, but what I really enjoyed were the conversations with the people.
I got to chat with people such as Jeremy White of CodeWeavers. When he asked me if I knew what WINE was, I answered "Wine is Not an Emulator?". I think Jeremy appreciated me knowing that!
Lincoln Durey from EmperorLinux was there and told me about the new tablet laptop that used Jarnal based handwriting recognition. He did say it wasn't as good as the Windows Tablet PC handwriting recognition! I think OneNote is the killer app for the tablet. Is there a open source application like OneNote out there? What was cool about the tablet was that it has a WACOM film on top of a regular LCD that talks to a serial port. He even had a toughbook with the same stuff on it.
It was a pleasure to meet Tony Luck who is a Principal Engineer at the Open Source Technology Center at Intel. I think we could identify with each other because we worked in similar organizations (OSTC / OSSL).
He is a kernel maintainer - which means he is royalty as far as Open Source goes. He works on making sure that Intel chip features work with and are fully utilized by Linux in his day job. Way cool - and he's a nice guy to boot.
Another person I met was Gianluca Brigandi who is with a small company called Novascope in Argentina. His company is building out a product based on Java Open Single SignOn (JOSSO) standard besides providing open source code for JOSSO. He is very concerned with interoperability and was keen to hear about Microsoft's open source efforts. I pointed him to https://www.codeplex.com/ and probably will be interacting with him on interoperability further. We spoke about everything from APIs for developers to use to interact with identity standards to open source licenses and what they mean for companies like his.
What brought home the power of conversations to me was a conversation with Rob Donath from SpikeSource. He approached us with an interoperability and packaging questions about Windows and open source software in a virtualization environment. And he said that he wouldnt have known who to talk to if we hadn't been reaching out to the Open Source community through events like this and Port 25.
I love my job! :-)