Socialtext people at OSCON and elsewhere

By Liz Henry | September 12, 2007, 4:05 pm | 0 Comments

I’m missing OSCON right now where a lot of our developers are headed this week. Ross Mayfield will be speaking on a panel, Who Gets to Decide What Open Source Means?, along with Danese Cooper, Brian Behlendorf, Chris DiBona, John Roberts, and Michael Tiemann. Meanwhile, the CPAL license submitted to the OSI by Socialtext is still being considered by the board. Russ Nelson’s comment is interesting:

Let’s give attribution requirements another chance in a simpler
license. If such a licensed software does not achieve the Open
Source effect, it will put the issue to rest.

A reasonable attitude — pass it and see how it does in the wild. I’m especially interested because I worked pretty hard on getting the CPAL together, going back and forth with open source community members like Dan Bricklin, and lawyers, and Ross, before the license proposal was submitted. Though I didn’t speak up much in public, I read through quite a lot of debate on the OSI mailing lists and on many blogs to get an idea of all the background of open source licensing issues, like attribution and external deployment.

Back to OSCON. Casey West, Kirsten Jones, Bill Odom, Chris Dent, Matthew O’Connor, Melissa Ness, Luke Closs, and Jon Prettyman (did I miss anyone?) are all up in Portland at the conference or hovering on the periphery. Whenever a bunch of them get together, no matter what else is going on there’s some late night hacking and mayhem. So I’m really curious to see what will come out of their trip in that dimension… something new built on the REST API, maybe. I’ve been following Chris McMahon, another of our developers, as he writes up a very interesting guide to developing with Ruby and the Socialtext REST API.

At BlogHer in Chicago, I’ll be speaking on two panels relating to blogging, identity, and community. One is on intolerance, diplomacy, and civility: “Does the Blogosphere Need an Intolerance Intervention?” and in the other, “Blogging: the Voice For Silenced Communities”, I am filling in at the last minute for Grace Davis. I’ll run a Wiki BOF and also will organize a wiki-related session during Sunday’s open space BlogHer run by Kaliya Hamlin. While I might not be hacking at this conference I will be wiki-ing, blogging, and talking to hundreds of great people.

And at the Socialtext office and in fact at our co-working office, we are helping to host a Meshwalk for entrepeneurs and investors, on August 1 — see their site for details.