Blogging Roller

Here's an update on my ApacheCon 2005 experience.This morning was day one of the conference proper. The opening keynote "Open source is not illegal -- yet" by Cory Doctorow was quite entertaining and at the same time quite scary. Cory explained how the governments of the world, including the US, are enacting draconian entertainment industry sponsored laws to mandate Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in all essentially all hardware and software products. He also explained how the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is working to help governments understand that DRM doesn't work, is anti-competitive and completely incompatible with open source software. I walked out of the talk, walked downstairs to the EFF table and made a donation. If you care about your digital rights and open source software (and bloggers rights) I urge you to do the same. Support the EFF.

Here's Cory delivering his keynote:


Here's the Inside Apache panel, which followed Cory's talk, led by ASF chairman Greg Stein:


After the opening session, I went to Simon Phipps' talk on The Zen of Free: Deriving a General Model For Open Source, which was excellent as I expected, and Jim Driscol's talk on Open Source for Business and Profit. Jim's case studies on Ant, Tomcat and WatchDog were my favorite part of the talk.

After lunch it was time for my session. I felt inadequate after a morning of listening to the pros and in the end I wasn't all that happy with my performance. I think the content and my slides were good, but that was the only goodness. Due to my cold (and sudafed), my mouth was dry. I was worried about running over like I did at JavaOne, so I think I rushed a bit and I finished 20 minutes early! I'm not sure what the audience thought, so if you attended I'd love to hear your impression of the talk. Pleaese be honest, I can take it.

I've posted my slides here on my site. The talk is an overview of Roller including features/benefits, limitations and architecture. It's intended as a primer for new users and developers:

    Roller: An Open Source Blogging Platform (Open Office format | PDF format)

That's all for now.