An alternate OSCON?

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 by Dave Winer.

OSCON == Open Source Convention.  

Pretty sure I was at the first one, in Monterrey. It was described to me by Tim O'Reilly, who puts it on, as a place where all the open source platforms could come together under one tent. Perl, Python, PHP, Apache and many others. 

It's been in Portland for the last few years, and this year it's moving to San Jose. 

I had hoped to lead a discussion at this year's OSCON about porting Frontier to Linux. Frontier is the runtime environment that the OPML Editor builds on. It's an object database, scripting language, outline-based editor and database browser, debugger, multi-threaded runtime, verb set, Web CMS, TCP stack, built-in web server. It was the environment that XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS and of course OPML were developed in. All this and the whole download is about 5MB and it installs in a minute. It also has an RSS-based updating mechanism and most updates are "hot" -- meaning you don't even have to relaunch. I love this enviroment, I built it starting in 1988 as the last programming environment I'd use, the one that had everything I wanted, and that's what it is. And because the early development was done so (ahem) early, it was designed to run well on 1Mhz machines with 1MB of memory. As a result it fits really nicely in today's machines.  

Now, it runs on Mac and Windows, but I really want it to run on Linux -- so I proposed a session at OSCON to discuss this and see if I couldn't recruit people to work on this. Unfortunately, yesterday I got the rejection email. I kind of expected it, because O'Reilly doesn't seem to like me these days, or whatever -- I don't know and it's not important.  

Then someone sent me a pointer to http://opensourcebridge.org/ which is in Portland on June 17-19. Now I have an incentive to see if people want to go there. San Jose is closer to Berkeley, so I'd rather go there, but a really open OSCON would be something that's worth supporting. There are other new projects that don't have space at OSCON, so maybe we could all get together in Portland and see what happens.