OSBC Pix

I unloaded the pix from camera and there were a couple from the OSBC trip last week, which gives me an excuse to say a couple more words about the conference, Microsoft, and copyblogging.

You know, as long as I keep flying back and forth between Vancouver and San Francisco with a camera in my pocket, ongoing readers are going to have to look at the occasional aerial shot. Boy, did this one ever make me wish I had the big camera.

As I’ve done before, I took the BART downtown and, as I’ve done before, I fell prey to the photographic lures of a white brick building. Both these photos are egregiously PhotoShopped.

The Conference · I mentioned that we’d had a lot of interviews; Dan Farber, who really gave us a workout, decorated his piece with a picture of me and Sun CIO Bill Vass, so I thought I’d return the favor.

Dan’s piece turned up in my vanity feed since he mentioned my name, then it turned up thirty or forty more times. Holy cow, are there are ever a lot of spamblogs and copyblogs out there pirating ZDNet content. Blecch.

That Panel · Andy Updegrove’s write-up on the “Open Standards and Open Source” noted that I hadn’t said much about the panel.

Here’s what’s wrong; we were all much too polite. There is a huge, gaping, existential gap, at this moment in history, between Microsoft and the rest of the industry. For simple, easy to understand business reasons, Microsoft is fighting ferociously to maintain their desktop lock-down. Right now a lot of Microsoft’s competitors and customers would like to crack the desktop open, and Microsoft doesn’t want that to happen.

During that panel, somebody should have said “Open Source and Open Standards aren’t the same thing at all, or even necessarily related, but they do have one thing in common: they are daggers aimed at the heart of Microsoft’s monopoly; there would be huge global business benefits if there were a free desktop marketplace, and Open Source and Open Standards would help get us there, and so Microsoft is against them.”

But we didn’t. One reason is that Jason Matusow is a nice guy and a smart guy and it’s human nature to flinch from open conflict. I still think the audience was in some respect cheated.