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.