OSCON Impressions

This week I � that is Lars Kurth � was at OSCON with a number of colleagues from our Foster City office in the US. It was also my first time at OSCON: here are my impressions.

Talks and atmosphere
I didn�t have much time to go to many talks, but the few I saw were good to excellent. In particular I liked Standing out in the Crowd a talk about women in open source by Kirrily Robert, The Role of Users in Open Source Projects by Stormy Peters and Cloud Computing � Why IT Matters by Simon Wardley. Simon Wardley conducted an experiment during the keynote: he wanted to see whether he could get through 150 slides in 15 minutes, without being boring! Well, he managed! Google provided some interesting stats on open source code collected by their crawlers. In particular statements such as �there is more open source PHP than Python code�, �there is more open source C code than C++�, and others were interesting; some were surprising. I meant to track the presenter from Google down, to get the detailed data on C vs. C++, but did not manage. I was hoping that the initial Symbian contribution of 20 million lines of code would make a difference. The atmosphere at the conference was very buzzy and friendly, and generally everybody was very curious as to what the Symbian platform was and what we were doing. You see the problem? Symbian is just not known in the US: hopefully we could make a bit of a difference.

Tutorial: inside Symbian tips and tricks
On the Tuesday, I hosted a tutorial on Symbian programming. It was very busy! A number of guest speakers, that is Regan Coleman, John Kern, Herb Jellinek and Chiedozi Acholonu, covered different topics related to application development. If you missed the tutorial, the presentations and examples can be found on the Wiki. I wanted to point out the HG2RT guide on scribd, which gives a good overview over the different programming environments for Symbian.

Cyberpunk beanbag land


We had a lounging area with beanbags, in the exhibition hall: thus beanbag land! It was very popular: maybe because of the rubber ducks we gave away? Maybe the beanbags were really comfy? Developers who came and talked to us gave us very good feedback on how to improve the platform. Topics such as applications, usability, signing and whether it will ever be possible for developers to flash their own version of the OS on a device were popular. It does show that open source developers really care. There was also a bit of criticism. For example Symbian is not yet fully open source, and only members can see the code. True: however, it does take time to transfer a proprietary codebase to open source. I am looking forward to next year�s OSCON: if all goes to plan, all code will be available under the EPL to everybody.

NPR & NY Times Media Mashup
On Friday, I attended the NPR and New York Times Media Mashup after a talk by NPR on Open Content and APIs. For those of you who don�t know, NPR stands for National Public Radio, which is one of the largest radio broadcasters in the US. NPR have been working on web APIs that enable the creation of web apps on the desktop and on mobile devices. The API exposes functionality such as live media feeds, station finder APIs, MP3 audio archive and news feeds which provide full stories and images.

NPR and Symbian collaborated on the creation of an NPR application, which is now available as open source on the NPR page of the Symbian developer website. If you are interested, you are invited to collaborate on the code and take it further. Despite a scheduling conflict with the OSCON closing reception, there were still a dozen web app developers present after the talks, who were excited about seeing new Symbian phones such as the Nokia N97 and Samsung i8910 HD.

P.S.: I wanted to thank the Symbian US team (see picture), that is Laura Merling, Raya Breit, Bill Washburn, John Kern and Vivek Kumar for all their great work! I certainly learned a lot about the US mobile application market.

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