OSCON 2010 - Closing Thoughts

It was a very hard landing that made everyone in the plane leave finger nail marks in their arm rests, but I am now back home in Ottawa. Portland is a great city and overall OSCON surpassed my expectations.

I met some great people and witnessed a lot of cool things but I think the key take away that I got out of this convention is that open source matters. Not that I didn't believe it before, but this really drove it home. Some people believe that open source is dangerous and full of broken promises. I strongly disagree. Sure there are bad projects out there, but that's not exclusive to the open source community. You still need to do your home work before adopting any technology. 

Think about the web and try to picture where it would be Today without open source. Would it even exist? I can build a list of game changers without even trying:

• W3C
• Apache
• WebKit
• MySQL, Postgres, etc.
• PHP
• jQuery
• memcache
• ... and on and on ...

As much as people love to hate PHP, its contributions to the web cannot be ignored.  There are also the technologies that are not directly tied to the web:

• Linux
• Perl
• Python
• Subversion, git, Mercurial, Bazaar ...
• ... and on and on ...

It's really not hard at all to expand these lists. Take the time to stop and think about this for a minute. How many other industries can you think of that has this kind of community effort. But better yet, how much did the efforts put into those projects help accelerate the evolution of new technologies? 

Out of the few tech conventions that I've gone to, one thing that makes OSCON stick out from the rest is that the discussions here were not about products. They were not about making money. It was a gathering of people that are passionate about their craft and that want to make a difference with their skills. I'm not trying to be dramatic, just watch to Tim O'Reilly's keynote, he'll sell it to you better than I could. One of the things he said was:

"[...] work on stuff that matters, not just to build cool tech that's going to make you rich or make people have a good time."

He then went on to talk about how open source technologies were used to literally save lives in Haiti. Sure, this is the extreme end of the spectrum and obviously not every open source project results in saved or improved lives, but they are in the least enabling. If you ever find yourself with that career angst where you want to stop writing yet another form that dumps data into a database just because it pays your mortgage, then you might profit considerably from contributing to an open source project that you find interesting. Better yet, before you complain about an open source project that did not live up to its promise, think about how you can help and then create a patch and submit it.

The world of computer science and software engineering is still very young when you compare it to traditional forms of engineering. We still have a long way to go but there is absolutely no denying that open source is not helping us get there faster.