Scott Kveton

Another beautiful weekend here in Portland brings with it throngs of open source developers, activists and groupies to the lovely Rose City. O’Reilly is slowly taking over the Oregon Convention Center (OCC) for what promises to be the biggest OSCON ever.

I’m here at the OCC right now for the Saturday and Sunday FLOSS Summit that has been organized by the likes of Dave Neary (GNOME Board) and Allison Randal (The Perl Foundation). The first day brought with it 13 people from Eclipse, Python, Perl, Gentoo, LUA, Plone, Apache, OSL, Drupal and Creative Commons and we had some great discussions about how each organization is setup the way that it is, etc.

Themes coming from the first day were varied. We all agreed that each of these organizations is slightly different but that there are significant advantages if we could work together on things like legal and trademarks. The key is keeping the pragmatists in the discussion and not the zealots (”No way can our Perl accountant work on the Python accounting!! Sacrilege!”). Instead of forming yet-another-foundation around the interest of these groups, we decided that it would make the most sense to approach existing organizations that are tasked with this sort of role and see if they would be willing to work with us. Barring that, we’d continue to use the list to see what good we could do.

The second day will bring some legal expertise from the likes of Larry Rosen and a few others. This day should be much more well attended.

The coolest thing about Saturday happened right after dinner. We were all heading back to our cars and we happened upon a family walking past us on the street. The mom and dad were hippies with some serious tattoos and their son points at my t-shirt and says “Whoa! Look, its a Firefox!”