I had the chance to spend Wednesday and Thursday at OSCON and I got to see a lot of really exciting stuff. I was happy to see a BSD booth sponsered by iXsystems, where I had the oppurtunity to meet a lot of great folks in the BSD community including Matt Olander from ixSystems, Dru Lavigne, whose blog provides a lot of great advice for those new and old to FreeBSD, Dan Langille who not only puts on BSDCan but also provides us with FreshPorts and FreshSource, and Kris Moore who has done a lot of work to make an awesome desktop OS ontop of FreeBSD 6.2 known as PCBSD. Needless to say, the chance to meet these folks was quite inspiring. Matt and I discussed at length on a number of topics related to marketing FreeBSD for both servers, and PCBSD as a desktop option. iXsystems has actually brought Kris onboard to work full time on PCBSD and while I don't really want that kind of desktop OS, it's really great to see some competition in the BSD world for systems like Ubuntu, and even more great to see some of the amazing stuff Kris has done with this system. A point that Matt made again and again is that companies that use FreeBSD internally tend to be less vocal about it than companies that use Linux, so to anyone who uses FreeBSD at work: let the world know! (We use FreeBSD for servers and desktops at work.)

My entire trip to OSCON wasn't spent at the BSD booth, I had an oppurtunity to see and support a number of other great projects, as well as some that aren't so great. One project that I saw but haven't had a chance to look into in more detail yet was Apatar which seems to be an "industrial strength" Yahoo! Pipes type tool. While mainly focused on being used internally for generating data transformations, I think this kind of tool can provide a great boon to a standard desktop if the scope is readjusted some. The ability to chain small tools together which transform input data is the foundation of the UNIX philosophy and a graphical interface for generating this kind of transformation with not-just textual output is something that could provide a lot of power to any user with a properly designed interface.

I had the oppurtunity to discuss various development issues with a Yahoo! developer, while me demoed a Flex Yahoo Messenger client. While I'm not inspired by anything Flash related, we did have a lively conversation about the powers and limitations of JavaScript and how much ECMAScript 4 sucks. (classes are not something JavaScript needs.)

I had a great discussion with a Pidgin developer (Richard Laager) on subjects ranging from packaging systems, to distributed version control, to GObjectification of libpurple (The feature I want to see the most in Pidgin development.)

The Sourceforge Community Choice awards were quite fun. I was there to represent XMMS2, and while I was disappointed to see us lose, I was quite pleased to see Audacity win, and I had a lively discussion with an Audacity developer about our projects and potential ways to collaborate. though Audacity has a different scope (being for recording and editing) then XMMS2, there are still many great ideas that can be shared between any project working with audio. So congratulations to the Audacity Project for both: producing a great project, and winning the Multimedia Category at the Comunity Choice Awards. (Also, Guido laughed at my joke [don't ask what it was I can't explain the context well enough for it to be funny.].)

Which brings me on to another topic: in a past blog entry, Tobias, one of XMMS2's lead developers, had discussed the idea of having an Open Audio summit, where a bunch of projects involved with open source audio development could get together and discuss topics of interest to music playing projects. Both the EFF and Creative Commons might be interested in sponsering such an event, and it would provide a great oppurtunity to foster a community between these various projects (as well as a place to discuss the MPRIS project.)