Ubuntu Live and OSCON Conferences in PDX

Greetings Tech Boise from your Pronetos pals. We’re over here in Portland, OR for the Ubuntu Live Conference as well as the OSCON Conference.

For those of you who don’t know, Ubuntu is a Linux based operating system that is taking the world by storm, to use a tired cliche - anyway -

The Pronetos site is built on Ubuntu, so we are here to check out some of the possibilities for further development of the site and to meet partners.

There are some interesting players, here - Ruby developers that are building on Ubuntu, called “Rubuntu.” Our great MenloPrk dev Rich Breton is actually at the forefront of Rubuntu app development, so Boise has a real flag in the ground where Ubuntu and Ruby on Rails is concerned.

Speaking of Ruby devs, I would LOVE to see the Boise Software Developers Group (BSDG) morph into what they have here in PDX, which is POSSE - the Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs - you see this difference? This is a group of softweare ENTREPRENEURS - not programmers that work at Big Co. Not that I don’t love BSDG - but we need the software guys in Boise to get that entrepreneurial bug.

Later today OSCON - the Open Source Convention starts. So there are lots and lots of Linux types and others running around.

One of the big things is talk about Facebook, how it is moving to a platform, and how the Open Source Community can counter that shift from one proprietary platform (MS, etc.) to another. There are a couple of great offerings out there - Ning for one from Marc Andreesen, and People Aggregator from Macromedia Founder Marc Canter. There is also a movement out there to move social networking to a set of standards. Very interesting.

This morning we’ve seen speakers from Canonical - the parent to Ubuntu, and MySQL. Very cool happenings over here Boise. More later.

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