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Bruce Perens

Bruce Perens speaks on Thursday morning.

Bruce Perens is a venerable elder in the open source community -- among many other things, he is a former programmer for Pixar Animation and the co-founder (with Eric Raymond) of Open Source Initiative (OSI). One of his specialties is explaining the vagaries of open source matters to non-technically minded folks.

His LinuxWorld lecture dealt with the issue of quid-pro-quo for members of the open source development community. He attempted (over the protests of hard-wired suits and money-minded Wall Street types) to explain why open source developers do and will continue to work for free. He deftly explained the many ways open source programmers benefit from their efforts.

Eric Raymond

Eric Raymond

Eric Raymond (ESR), famous in the open source community for his essays (such as The Cathedral & The Bazaar) and his Linux and open source advocacy efforts, spoke to a fairly large crowd Thursday afternoon. A self-made and self-proclaimed open source evangelist, Eric Raymond is a legitimate Unix/Linux guru and author. He also co-founded Open Source Iniative (OSI) with Bruce Perens. He is a colorful public speaker and has lectured extensively on open source issues.

The conference session was titled Meme Hacking for Fun and Profit. A lot of "suits" showed up to listen to what Eric had to say but many of them just could not understand how going open source could be a smart thing.

True to his religious devotion to the open source revolution, Raymond's lecture aimed to make open source enthusiasts into open source advocates. Raymond gave clear, concise arguments and suggested approaches to convince corporate decision makers to use and/or develop open source products.

Gimp 1.2 News

A couple of the Gimp folks show the latest Gimp technology.

Michael Hammel of The Graphics Muse along with another member of the Gimp project (whose name I didn't catch) spoke about what has been going on with Gimp and what to expect for version 1.2.

Most of the features found in Adobe Photoshop version 5 will be available in Gimp 1.2.

Some of the exciting new features we'll see in Gimp 1.2 include a smudge tool, a dodge/burn tool, and better transforms, gradients, and palletes.

Some of the new filters will include GFlare, Gimpressionist (very cool!), NewsPrint, GAP (Gimp Animation Plugin), and Sphere Designer.

If you're less than satisfied with the Script-Fu scripting language available in Gimp, you'll be happy to know you'll be able to write scripts in Python and Perl!

Plus, there will be better support for graphics tablets as well.

The Gimp project is looking for Mac programmers to help port the project to MacOS (may be easier once MacOS X is mainstay).

More Expo Stuff

Doran posing with a couple of the lovely FreeBSD devilettes.

Chadd participating in a TurboLinux booth skit.

The Expo again ran full-force on Thursday. We didn't get to spend much time in there because we were so busy attending conference sessions and keynotes, but we did get to pop in for some more goodies and visits.

There were a lot of exhibitors showing off hardware and/or software products which deal with Linux clustering -- connecting two or more Linux systems together and configuring them to behave as one system. Some of the world's fastest supercomputers are just many Linux machines clustered together. TurboLinux's TurboCluster is a Linux distribution designed for clustering.

Cross-platform development tools did not seem as prevalent this year as they were last year, but there were still some vendors showing off their products which let you develop software for Linux, Windows and other platforms concurrently.

Java on Linux is definitely a bigger deal this year.