First off, my overriding impression is that the day was really more about Web 2.0 than open source. Many of the companies featured were not what I consider open source companies - Google, Yahoo!, craigslist, Second Life and Dabble DB may be built on open source software, but they are not open source companies. Odd for a show that is all about open source. Its not to say that the sessions were not interesting (they were) but just that they were not particularly about open source.

(Aside: Yes, I know that JasperSoft has a closed source commercial product. But we don’t claim that it is open source, and we sell it to a different market than we market our open source products to. We do not use our open source products to sell our closed source products. I don’t keep my portfolio invested in a single market sector either.)

Highlights and my thoughts from sessions not covered in detail already:

My favorite quote was from Jim Buckmaster, CEO of craigslist - “10,000,000 users are more effective than your staff”. Hard to argue with, and Jim has done a great job of keeping 10 million folks happy.

Danese Cooper of Intel grilled Bill Hilf of Microsoft about their open source strategy. He made a bunch of claims which didn’t hold water for me. Amoung other dubious claims he stated that Microsoft had never spread any disinformation about Linux and that the infamous “Get The Facts” campaign was never targeted to the open source community. A person sitting near me muttered “yeah, it was targeted against us.” Bill also ducked questions about why the Open Office “export as Office” was significantly better than the Office 2007 “import Open Office document” plugin and made some vague claims about the need for backwards compatability. I doubt I was the only person in the audience who wondered why Open Office’s lack of support for old versions of Office causes problems creating an OpenXML file that can be opened correctly by the latest versions of Office. (For those interested in learning more, be sure to check out Rob Weir’s report on ODF->Office translation at his blog.) Finally, when asked if IE 7 would contain support for features that would allow Microsoft to continue trying to force browser lock in, he replied that IE 7 “will be the most standards complient browser out there” and ignored the question of proprietary extensions. Jason Matusow, you will be missed.

Finally, there was a facinating discussion between Tim O’Reilly and Chad Dickerson of Yahoo! about open access to data, again with heavy Web 2.0 emphasis. They discussed who owns data on sites like Flickr, especially the meta data added by the community as tags. Who owns the metadata, and what rights do they have towards them? Should metadata providers be able to download or export the data they have provided? Should the owners of the material being annotated be able to do the same? Who owns the metadata? Some of the ideas floated included requiring taggers to assign a license or Creative Commons restriction on each tag! The issues raised also apply to such sites as del.icio.us or even sites Yahoo! doesn’t own