We have WiFi access now! I'm posting from Dave Winer's keynote (still the introduction).

Dave Winer (introduced as "King of the Blogging World") said that was a great introduction, and he didn't agree with anything in it. Call to open source & commercial software worlds to work with each other. Speaking as a commercial developers who has also released open source.

Q: "Proprietary" label used to be sold as a good word. Open source just used it to differentiate themselves.

"40-person company" is what he recommends would be best for customers. 2-3 people doesn't cut it. But those 40-person companies don't exist anymore. Users look at Unix-style OS and think it must be very difficult to write. But it's actually much harder to write software that's easy to use, while users won't recognize its complexity.

Halley Suitt: Is she missing the marketing for open source? What does Linux look like? There's something with a penguin. Someone helpfully brought up his laptop and opened it for her. "My Linux virginity is gone," she announced.

Internet Explorer: users are stranded. Has a development team, but they don't fix the bugs.

XML-RPC: Dave did design in 2 weeks, met with Don Box et al once. Secret of success: not overloaded with complexity. Extra features were aggressively not included. Has not changed since 1999.

Audience member disputed the assertion that there were no 40-person software firms. Many CMS packages (shrinkwrapped) come from such companies.

What audience member wants: to be able to fix software. Even if developer goes bankrupt. Dave: What you want is not to be locked in. You want open file formats. Another audience member: retraining is high part of switching cost, not data conversion. Q: Source code escrow?

Q: With IE, doesn't want to be stranded. His weblog won't display properly in IE, and he can't fix it. Dave: Source code for IE should have been put in escrow and released already, because they're not working on it. He had strongly suggested that as a remedy in the MS antitrust trial.

Movivations for Open-Source Developers essay. To do: find link; it scrolled off my NetNewsWire aggregator before I read it.

Q: Audience member complained that Radio Userland has support issues, documentation issues.

Dave: They all do! There's no money in software! It's $39.95; that doesn't pay for a lot of support.

Sound bite about personally not liking Bill Gates or Richard Stallman. Neither of them take baths. This is quoted more accurately elsewhere.

Discussion of unifying variants of RSS.

And here we come to the climactic faceoff of the keynote. Apparently Dave Winer & Bill Kearney have never met in person before. I'll let the record speak for itself (search the web for both their names), but if you've ever seen their online mailing list discussions, you'd expect a matter vs. antimatter reaction if ever they were to meet.

Bill Kearney: I'm Bill Kearney, from Syndic8.

Dave: (no particular reaction) What's Syndic8?

Bill: (explains, happening to mention again that he's Bill Kearney)

Dave: Oh, you're Bill Kearney. My God.

[Bill starts talking about "democracy, rather than benevolent dictatorship"; discussion degenerates into shouting & swearing. Elapsed time: about 15 seconds. The play-by-play doesn't really matter, but if you want one, see Aaron's weblog. After the OSCOM organizer Charlie steps in after a few minutes, Dave is too rattled to move on and ends the session.]

I didn't get to ask my question.

To come.

Warning: possible drivel ahead.

Thought for the day: As I sit here in this bus, for some reason, I remember reading about someone who got a steady WiFi signal on a high-speed train in some low-density area of the country. Thinking about it, I'm not sure how that's possible with regular transmitters--with a garden-variety access point having a range of less than 300 feet, they would be out of it in seconds. And I've never heard of enough transmitters/repeaters strung together to make handoff continuous. (Could someone on the train have been retransmitting an Internet connection they made through other means?) If Amtrak really wanted to do that, and I'm finally getting to the thought I mentioned, could they set up Pringles-can transmitters pointed down the track? They're very directional and have a great range (in Aspen's network, apparently miles). It may be easier than somehow getting internet access into the train through the overhead electrical system or satellite and having Amtrak retransmit it to everyone inside, since I can't imagine the overhead electrical system is great for data. (Then again, if the electrical system does have a constant enough connection to modulate data on top of it, they should do so right away.) I'm sure there are many people who have throught through this more than I just did, but having standard WiFi Internet access on trains would be a great marketing advantage, considering airlines' eagerness to adopt it but the significant expense, technical difficulties, and slow rollout it is currently entailing.

Amtrak would have to put a long fiber line along their right-of-way (which telecom companies have largely already put there, judging by the all those orange "Warning: Fiber!" tubes stuck in the ground along the routes) so they would need to tap it every so often with some network equipment. Maybe that equipment would be cheaper than satellite or a long-range WLAN protocol. Or maybe not, and I'm blowing smoke. Or maybe they already have WiFi, and I'm still blowing smoke. Oh well. I never claimed otherwise. End of today's thought.

Interesting panel discussion.

#1 - Sleepycat CEO
#2 - Lisa ?; lawyer
#3 - Aaron Swartz
#4 - Larry Rosen

Open Source (free because it's useful, strategic) vs. Free Software (everything should be free) vantage points.

Q. Creative commons vs. source license? Larry Rosen: Courts have confused the issue of software IP by applying both patents and copyright to it. [I'd wondered about this problem; software is kind of in the middle of both and neither is quite right.]

Q. W3C DTD & Schema copyrightable? W3C says yes. But would content using that schema be copyrighted by the W3C? Lisa: Functionality/methods can't be covered by copyright. --maybe that applies to this case.

OpenOffice person in audience. Teddy Ruxpin case—successful contributory copyright lawsuit. Bootleg cassettes made Ruxpin tell different stories, make different movements.

Q on "Infected" code (could open source contain stealth IP)? Topical; SCO lawsuit.

Aggregation. Aaron: It's obviously illegal to put scraped feed contents on your page without attribution, obviously legal to write a tool that scrapes to generate feeds. Dave Winer: case of someone who didn't know RSS was generated auto by Radio. Got mad when it appeared on someone else's site. After that was explained, problem kind of disappeared.

The RSS topic was starting to get too long and the moderator wanted to switch subjects, before I could get my question in, which was exactly along those lines. He said to defer those questions to Dave Winer’s keynote tomorrow.

An example of bad user interface design. On my bus to Boston, the seats had headphone jacks with two volume controls. They were vertical thumbwheels with no marks or apparent indication of their range or current setting. Down was LO, up was HI, and the two wheels were marked LEFT and RIGHT. Entirely separate controls. So, turning it on you'd not only have no idea what volume would come out, you'd also have no idea what balance it would have (unless you first turned both wheels toward "LO" until they would go no further), and there usually be would be no way to equalize the left and right balance (without doing the same trick and then turning them both up, very carefully, simultaneously). Why would they design it like that? It was exposing a simple internal implementation of the more human-centered concept of master volume and balance. Maybe someone designed a single volume control then thought balance would be a great feature to add, but skimped on its implementation, exposed the internals, and ended up making it much harder to use for the most common case. There's a lesson in that for interface designers everywhere. And why have a balance control at all? You had to use the jacks with headphones, and headphones are not known for their widely varying distances from each ear.

Going to OSCOM in Boston today.

Test again.

Test post #3.

After a quick jaunt to England and some time spent working on other projects, I'm back. The long-awaited (by whom I don't know) and somewhat garbled (by me) notes from day 5 of SD East are also up.