Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I was very pleased to be able to have a joint session with Tom Marlay of Gowlings on Open Source, and Business.  The session was well attended, and was a quick overview of open source issues.  For my part, I covered mostly the issues in this story which I wrote some time ago.  Tom covered the details of specific risks, and license agreements from a legal point of view.  There was definitely an appetite to talk longer.

This is a recursive post.  I am blogging about the Blogging in Ottawa Panel.  We had a lively discussion, but the real value of the session was to agree to continue to build a blogging community in Ottawa.  At the end, I volunteered to begin to maintain a list of Ottawa bloggers.  Here’s the first cut.  I will turn it into a standing post shortly.

• snook.ca
• blog.jadedpixel.com
• boxofchocolates.ca
• dailypixel.com
• primeminister.ca
• betterthanedlin.com
• tech.nologi.ca
• blog.leetsoft.com
• www.troubleseeker.com
• exocortex.org
• saunderslog.com
• simplyrelevant.com
• phoenixrealm.com
• vlad.photostand.org
• model.ca
• sherman.ca
• www.ittoolbox.com/unix/bsd
• dan.langille.org

More to come.  Stay tuned!

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, is giving a talk on building communities around Open Source.  For Mike, the key elements of creating an open source platform are:

1. Great Technology
2. Broad Adoption
3. Architecture of Participation
4. Hijacked by a Fanatical Community

His talk is excellent.  Eclipse is a cool blend of traditional hacker-driven open source, and corporate smarts due to the genes they inherited from inside IBM.  For instance, they have fixed release dates, and synchronize all elements of the release in order to get rid of the dependencies. 

Great stuff.  A heady blend of open source fandom, with street smart evangelism. 

I am sitting in the car outside Bitheads facility on Carling Avenue, waiting for the Ted to come and open the doors.  In a little less than 45 minutes, we’re going to be underway.  It’s been a lot of work for the last few weeks for David Keys, Ross McLeod, Craig Fitzpatrick, Peter Childs, and myself, but I think it’s going to be a great event.

Last night, over beers, Peter expressed the thought that Barcamp was a bit like open source.  People come, expecting to share ideas, and contribute, without necessarily any expectation of getting anything but some new friends back.  That’s a cool thought!  That’s the Barcamp meme, in my opinion.

In that spirit, expect to see as many blog posts as I can manage throughout today.  On Technorati, they’ll be tagged BarCamp Ottawa.  I’ll also be encouraging other bloggers in the crowd to do the same.