The final day of EuroOSCON 2006 began with a thoughtful look at the political issues surrounding software patents. Florian Mueller spoke about how the different political parties view the patent issue differently (something that’s perhaps obvious, but important to understand) and how the open source community needs to continue taking action against software patents in Europe. Some of his advice included: educating small/medium enterprises, more focus (patents vs fair use vs DRM), becoming active in all political parties and creating lobbying forums and networks. [Frankly, this is just begging for a specialized social application to help these folk! MyPatentFreeEuroSociety anyone?]

I also listened in on Robert Lefkowitz’s keynote, Architecting Bable. R0ml argued that our source code is all in English, but English is really a minority language in the world. He proposed a road map allowing the localization of identifiers, the comments, keywords and finally dynamic libraries. An interesting comment came from the audience: “this has been tried before, but it failed. The English speaking programmers rejected it as it would expose employers to a far wider audience of programmers.” Though provoking.

In The Conway Channel 2006, Damian showed off his awesome Perl List::Maker and Contextual::Return modules. It’s cool to see list comprehension making a return, and this all makes me think back to the really cool Haskell language.

The day ended for me with a talk on Django by Adrian Holovaty. It’s an awesome web application framework (I love the automatically generated admin interface) - check it out here.

Now, I’m off to the train station—unfortunately missing Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu talk. It’s been a stimulating EuroOSCON—with many ideas and lots of energy. I look forward to the next.

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