OSCON 2007 Presentations

I had a blast at OSCON this year. Portland was, as always, a fantastic city, and I really enjoyed catching up with what I call my "second family" of conference friends that I see several times a year.

Ben and I gave three presentations this year, and they were all well-received. As promised, here are the slides for each presentation (in PDF format):

• Our ever popular How to Protect Your Open Source Project from Poisonous People. It was well-received, but after a dozen or so times giving this talk, I think we're about ready to retire it. You can also view the video if you missed the talk. It's a really useful talk if you're working in an open source community.
  
  
• We had a lot of fun giving Subversion Worst Practices, which was a tongue in cheek answer to our "Subversion Best Practices" talk that we gave last year. This talk was an absolute blast to give, and the audience really seemed to enjoy it, even though we (sneakily) tossed in the actual best practices for each worst practice.
  
  
• Lastly, my favorite talk was What's In It For Me? How Your Company Can Benefit from Open Sourcing Code. This talk provided some reasons for a company to run an open source project in a true collaborative fashion as opposed to dumping code over the wall. I had some great post-talk chats with some of the attendees and I'll be refining some of our arguments for a future re-presentation of this talk. I'm hoping that Ben and I will get a chance to get this talk up on Google Video as well.
  
  

So that was OSCON 2007. I really enjoy co-presenting with Ben, and we've now co-presented over a dozen talks. We've actually gotten to a point where we not only finish each other's sentences but sometimes even provide words in the middle of the other's sentences. After our last talk, Cat Allman asked us if we'd be offended if she called us "Frick and Frack" (after Click and Clack, the Tappit Brothers on Car Talk). All I can say to that is:

Don't code like my brother!

Interview in the Chicago Sun Times

The Chicago Sun Times interviewed me for their "What's my line" feature today. I'm pretty happy with how it came out except for the fact that it goes on and on about how much I like Chicago's architecture , lake and weather, making no mention of the fact that I met my wife here.

It's not a problem really—nothing that a few years in the Witness Protection Program can't fix.

Stallman Shoots Free Software Movement in Foot. Again.

For years, Richard Stallman has tirelessly worked to advance the Free Software movement, but I wonder if he understands just how much irresponsible accusations like this harm the very same movement that he works so hard to help. From emacs-devel@gnu.org (emphasis mine):

We did not switch to Subversion because the people who develop Subversion are not sympathetic to the ideas of the free software movement. That is a sufficient reason, given that CVS works fine.

See the full thread here, and don't miss Karl Fogel's response as well as Jim Blandy's response (Karl and Jim are two of the founders of Subversion).

As a Subversion developer and an advocate of both open source and free software, reading this kind of crap from Richard makes my blood boil. More importantly perhaps, it makes me want to remove the words "free software" from my vocabulary.

Richard, if you really want to help Free Software, you might want to leaf through a copy of "How to Win Friends and Influence People", because you sure aren't winning any friends right now—in fact, you're in danger of losing the ones you've had for years.