PDX Session 2 - O’Reilly’s Keynote

2:44 pm - On now, Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media. He’s talking about why he thinks Ubuntu is cool. I like Tim’s Mantra: O’Reilly distributes the knowledge of innovators.

O’Reilly has some cool criteria for judgong cool technology:

1) Are there interesting people associated with it?
2) The technology is on track with a long term trend
3) The technology is disruptive
4) The technology uptake is accelerating
5) The technology has grassroots support - built from the bottom up
6) It inspires passion
7) It has deeper social implications Better information makes a difference in its adoption
and use

O’Reilly is noting that most of the Internet applications we use - Amazon.com, Ebay, are much the same as the lock in with traditional software vendors such as Microsoft. We’ve just substituted one generation of applications for the other - they just have the Internet as their platform rather than the desktop.

I am just taking a minute to look around the room and man there are hundreds of people of here! For Ubuntu? Who would have thought. When I get back to Boise, I promise to start the Ubuntu users group. I didn’t know there were so many of you out there.

O’Reilly talking now about the four freedoms of software. See the Free Software Foundation if you are interested in learning about that.

I like this term too: Web 2.0 is an “architecture of participation.”

*Flickr’s default is “public”
*P2P’s default is to use your resources
*Last.fm listens to your music
*Everytime you search Google, you add to the web database

Tim stated that the PC is not the platform. Now talking about social networking communities. That seems to be a big thing here, but most here agree that there are other opportunities beyond Facebook.

I have to tell you, it is really something getting exposed to all this stuff. There are a lot of folks who are way ahead and thinking about what Technology will look like tomorrow. And that is Tim’s closing point: you release technology based not upon what the world looks like today, but what it will look like when you finish creating the technology.

The COO of Canonical is closing things out right now. All the keynotes are done; there are still lots of sessions left. The COO of Canonical is a woman, by the way. Great thing to see women in high levels of management in the high-tech world. Good job Jane Silber!

Alright, we are off to another session . . .

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