Tech Chat at the Summer Shack

Last night I braved a rainy 30-minute drive into Boston to attend a LinuxWorld party with fellow CHENer Randy Wambold...

Ah, CDDL vs. the GPL, JavaServer Faces vs. Struts. Which word is more overused: enterprise? extensible? solution?

We must be at a tech soiree.

The nice folks at O'Reilly were kind enough to invite us to their party last night at the always happening Summer Shack. We chatted with an interesting mix of folks from O'Reilly, Novell, LinuxWorld Magazine and the Gnome Foundation. As one might expect, veterans of the show remarked (somewhat wistfully) on the increasing presence of big name vendors and suits. It's an indication to us that open source software is squarely in the midst of a transformation from the domain of a niche of software programmers and IP legal experts, to a large-scale, market-wide application.

When asked for their take on the show's big announcements, fellow partiers cited Sun's StarOffice 8 preview, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux news and Novell's open-source collaboration server project, called Hula. (Why do open source projects get all the cute names?)

Being in technology publishing, our fellow cocktail conversers from O'Reilly are at a very interesting cross section. We enjoyed talking about the way O'Reilly readers use their publications, and the implications this might have for the future. Will O'Reilly increasingly publish exclusively on-line, eschewing print books? There is a quality about tangible, paper-based books that seems to make readers loathe to give them up, despite what would seem to be all of the obvious economic, environmental and convenience reasons to do so.