SCALE 8x Highlights

I just returned today (unfortunately on an overnight flight, which always causes me to mostly lose the next day to sleep problems) from SCALE 8x. I spoke about GPL enforcement efforts, and also was glad to spend all day Saturday and Sunday at the event.

These are my highlights of SCALE 8x:

• Karsten Wade's keynote was particularly good. It's true that some of his talk was the typical messaging we hear from Corporate Open Source PR people (which are usually called “Community Managers”, although Karsten calls himself a “Senior Community Gardener” instead). Nevertheless, I was persuaded that Karsten does seek to educate Red Hat internally to have the right attitude about FLOSS contribution. In particular, he opened with a an illuminating literary analogy (from Chris Grams) about Tom Sawyer manipulating his acquaintances into paying him to do his work. I hadn't seen Chris' article when it was published back in September, and found this (“new to me”) analogy quite compelling. This is precisely the kind of activity that I see happening with problematic copyright assignments. I think the Tom Sawyer analogy fits aptly to that situation, because a contributor first does some work without compensation (the original patch), and then is manipulated even further into giving up something of value (signing away copyrights for nothing in return) for the mere honor of being able to do someone else's work. It was no surprised that after Karsten's keynote, jokes abounded in the SCALE 8x hallways all weekend that we should nickname Canonical's new COO, Matt Asay, the “Tom Sawyer of Open Source”. I am sure Red Hat will be happy that their keynote inspired some anti-Canonical jokes.
• Another Red Hat employee (who is also my good friend and former cow-orker), Richard Fontana, also gave an excellent talk that many missed, as it was scheduled in the very final session slot. Fontana put forward more details about his theory of the “Lex Mercatoria” of FLOSS and how it works in resolving licensing conflicts and incompatibility inside the community. He contrasted it specifically against the kinds of disputes that happen in normal GPL violations, which are primarily perpetrated by those outside the FLOSS world). I agreed with Fontana's conclusions, but his argument seemed to assume that these in-community licensing issues were destabilizing. I asked him about this, pointing out that the community is really good at solving these issues before they destabilize anything. Fontana agreed that they do get easily resolved, and revised his point to say that the main problem is that distribution projects (like Debian and Fedora) hold the majority of responsibility for resolving these issues, and that upstreams need to take more responsibility on this. (BTW, Karsten was also in the audience for Fontana's talk, has written a more detailed blog post about it.) Fontana noted to me after his talk that he thought I wasn't paying attention, as I was using my Android phone a lot during the talk. I was actually dent'ing various points from his talk. I realized when Fontana expressed this concern that perhaps we as speakers have to change our views about what it means when people seem focused on computing devices during a talk. (I probably would have thought the same as Fontana