OSCON 2006 Wed. Keynotes (Tim O’Reilly)

In the openning keynote, Tim O’Reilly presented what he calls his 5 big ideas about open source.  Some I thought were fairly interesting. 

1. Architectures of participation beyond software development (Web 2.0)
   The idea here is that in this new world of Web 2.0, successful companies are looking to architectures where people build systems simply by using them.  He noted companies like Amazon and Google, where basically through the act of using the tools, users contribute to the growth of the application.  He argues that open source needs to borrow from this model — (and to a large degree I think does) — in that people build tools out of need.  The next step of course is to share those tools once created.
2. Open Source Licenses are Obsolete:
   I guess context needs to be added here.   O’Reilly wasn’t saying that the licenses themselves are obsolete within the current software distribution model, but in the Web 2.0 model, where software is no longer distributed but hosted, the open source license model is broken.  So how do we deal with this?  O’Reilly notes that we need to reinvent “open source” for a world in which software is performed rather than distributed and rely on vast databases and not just code.  He points to some new development models (mashups, developers apis like Google APIs and Flickr Services), and argues that the open source community needs to address this idea of building an open services api.
3. Asymmetic Competition
   The idea that open source should look seriously at business frameworks and how they can be implemented to drive open source.
4. Operations of advantage
   Notion that in the future, software will be hosted and virtualization will become more important in the future.
5. Open Data
   Data needs to be made free as we at this point don’t know what data lockdown will look like in the future.  He points to some services working on this problem: http://www.movemydata.org/

–TR