oscon 2009

Let's first begin with the pricing, the prices for hobbyist are umm, insane, almost 2000$. Insane for someone like me who ain't sponsored by a company or anything. :| But they were kind enough to provide access to Expo hall and BoF sessions for free, kudos for that. Expo hall is fairly big, from top of my head that would be 40 booths, presenting just about everything. Microsoft is for example presenting Windows 7 and has "bad vista" stickers, which kinda surprised me given the enterprise nature of Microsoft. They have possibly the most cool exhibit, the guitar hero on xbox (with guitars!). Not only that, but they have the only stickers (in the expo hall) i find worth putting on my laptop!

From the other folks linux found has a booth, they are celebrating the 10th anniversary and giving away free t-shirts. Their mission is to help open source with non technology, like how to become a non profit entity and how to raise founding. EFF also has a booth there, i bought their t-shirt, it's pretty cool, has "defend bloggers' rights" on it :). I couldn't help it but get a feel that the entire thing is too enterprisey, for example the open solaris guy that did talk at intel booth, his way of talking was screaming "marketing". Also gear6 booth attracted my attention, but there was only marketing girl there who couldn't go beyond "we offer active active replication" (she had no idea what that means) :). Lopsa had a booth there as well, i never imagined that such organization exist.

Lot's of cool persons, i met with @kreneskyp, we were supposed to have a hacking session. Judging by results one could say it was more of a drawing session than anything else :). However the truth is far from that, we got to discuss how to implement the redundant main worker. In theory we solved all problems (but one!), now it has to be implemented. Also i've got to know muhc better pydra's internals, overall it was very productive hack session. Note to self, always bring whiteboard markers!