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November 19, 2003
CDXPO Wrap-Up
I'm headed home from CDXPO. I think Jupiter Media had high hopes for this conference. As is usual with a Jupiter Media event, the venue, support, and speakers were first rate. I enjoyed every presentation I went to and learned many new things. One of the best parts of the conference was one track of nothing but Jupiter Research analysts presenting results of their research in various areas. This alone was well worth the price of admission.
I hate Las Vegas, but it was nice to be here with many other conferences going on. Monday, I was able to have dinner with Doug Kaye, Doc Searls, Chris Pirillo, and also meet some new friends. Unfortunately, CDXPO was not well attended and I found myself lonely at times---not what one expects at a conference. I think CDXPO has a future given the quality of the content, but it will take some work to build the audience. I'll be interested to see what Jupiter decides to do with it.
02:57 PM | Recommend This | Print This
CDXPO Presentation on Web Services Intermediaries
I gave my presentation (slides here) this morning to a smaller than I'd expected, but still very interactive crowd. The discussion was about what Web Services Intermediaries are and why they're important to business hoping to scale SOA-based applications. I based most of what I said on things I've written for InfoWorld over the last year. I touched in one slide on a cross-section of vendors in this space and what their strengths are. Its clear that you can't pick a WSI vendor based on feature set. They differ much more clearly in the metaphor they use than the raw feature set. I've got an article coming out in InfoWorld about that.
02:43 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Sympathy for Darl
I've gotten some email from people and some comments on the Darl McBride story I wrote who obviously misunderstood my position. They mistook my sympathy for Darl as a person for sympathy for SCO's claims and asked me to somehow back them up.
Let me be clear. I am not sympathetic to SCO'S claims. I find them terribly inconvenient for a number of things I'm trying to do and feel that the SCO suit doing a real disservice to open source software (OSS). Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I'm a big supporter of OSS.
When I say this is a real issue, its not because I think that SCO's claims have merit. I says its a real issue because I think sooner or later, some company was bound to make an infringement claim against an open source product that challenges the very notion of OSS. When that happens, there's two ways to solve the problem: legislation or court. In short, I think this kind of show down was inevitable. Its going to be painful, but if OSS is to really take off in the enterprise, these questions will have to be answered in a clear way.
It would be a worse outcome, in my opinion, if SCO were to go away, leaving this whole thing unsettled. Some other company would inherit SCO's licenses and claims and the battle would need to be joined again at a later date, leaving uncertainty and doubt in the void.
I say I have some sympathy for Darl because I've been the officer of a corporation and would hate to be a in a position where I feel like my duty is to do something that will make thousands of people hate me. I don't actually know Darl and I've got no sympathy for the SCO claims, but listening to him, I did get the feeling that he believes what he's saying. That doesn't make him right, but it makes him less evil. If you have to believe he's evil to fight your fight, then I can understand it. Personally, I don't have to hate the man to disagree with him.