Topic: Software Development
Prosumer media, also known as user-generated content (or blogging in the context of this discussion) is the foundation on which the business of each of these three panelists is built. Mena Trott of Six Apart, Mark Fletcher of Bloglines, and Rich Skrenta of Topix.net field questions about the business models related to blogging, the future of user-generated content, and the pressure to innovate while dealing with the challenges of scaling to meet demand.
As a co-founder of Netscape and co-author of Mosaic, Marc Andreessen
has a unique view of the development of web programming. In his
keynote address, he briefly reviews the history of the computer
industry and how programming has moved from being machine dependent
and complicated to become a dynamic and easy-to-learn process. In
combination with the meteoric drop in hardware and network costs,
more powerful applications are becoming much easier to develop
through worldwide collaboration.
CalConnect's Dave Thewlis discusses Apple's announcement of its iCal Calendar Server (an open-source implementation of a CalDAV server to be provided with the Leopard release of Mac OS X) and the "free/busy" demo by the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, touting interoperability between seven different calendaring systems including proprietary systems such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.
Microsoft is a platform company and they are eager to redefine how business practices are automated. Simon Witts, Corporate VP of the Enterprise and Partner Group at Microsoft, discusses the company's new People-Ready campaign, which aims to change the formal definition of business practice and empowers people to make decisions. As keynote speaker at the Software 2006 Conference, Witts describes the Microsoft strategy for customer relationship management.
One seventh of humanity cannot read and write. Because of this, making projects in the developing world often depends on educating locals and distributing low tech devices, such as books. At the Software 2006 conference the Scaling Organizations Panel discusses how problems in the developing world cannot be solved by imposing solutions from the top, but by co-creating appropriate solutions with the aim of building trust and respect.
In the green pastures of technology trends, Damian Conway leaves no sacred cow un-tipped. This entertaining keynote address, from the 2005 O'Reilly European Open Source Convention, pokes fun at many hot topics for software developers including: software patents, open source, mash ups, online communities, rapid application development, operating system zealotry, and even Joss Whedon's movies and TV shows.
Next generation web applications will be built by business owners, managers, and users who do not consider themselves to be software developers. IBM's Rod Smith explains how technically savvy users can "scratch their own itch," using technologies, such as PHP and wikis, to develop their own business applications.
Confused about what the second draft of the General Public License version 3 means? Let 2006 Google/O'Reilly Open Source Legal Eagle award winner Cliff Schmidt walk you through the changes. Schmidt also speaks about recent moves by the Open Source Initiative, as well as Google, to combat license proliferation. He also talks about some changes to the Apache license, and explains how a non-lawyer such as himself wins a Legal Eagle award in the first place.
Community and collaboration are cornerstones of the open source philosophy and key assets for businesses built on free software. MySQL, the highly successful open source database, depends on the strength of good relations with its loyal base of developers and users. In this talk, Kaj Arno showcases the role of community in his company's quest to balance the making of great software through open source principles and the need to earn a profit.
David Heinemeier Hansson discusses some of the guiding principles underlying the development of Ruby On Rails, the open source web applications framework. His goal was to develop a toolset that would make web developers happy and to allow them to have confidence in their code. He believes that Ruby on Rails frees the programmer from repetitive drudgery and unnecessary complexity.
