Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/22/scale-8x.html

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 in the situation.) The online conversation
  during a talk is a useful part of the
  interaction. Stormy Peters
  even once suggested before a talk at Linux World that we should have a
  way to put dents up on the screen as people comment during a talk. I
  may actually try to find a way to do this next time I give a talk.
• I also
  saw Brian
  Aker‘s presentation about
  Drizzle, which is
  a fork of the MySQL codebase that he began inside Sun and now
  maintains further (having left Sun before the Oracle merger
  completed). I was impressed to see how much Drizzle has grown in just
  a few years, and how big its user base is. (Being a database
  developer, Brian thinks user numbers in the tens of thousands
  is just a start, but there are many FLOSS projects that would
  be elated even to max out at tens of thousands users. While I admire
  his goals of larger user bases, I think they’ve already accomplished a
  lot.) I talked with Brian for an hour after his talk all about the
  GPL and the danger of single-copyright-held business models. He’s
  avoided this for Drizzle, and it sounds like none of the consulting
  companies spouting up around the user community has too much power
  over the project. (Brian also
  blogged a summary of
  some of the points in the discussion we had.)
• Because it directly time-conflicted Brian’s talk, I missed my friend
  and
  colleague’s Karen
  Sandler’s talk about trademarks, but I hear it went well. Karen
  told me not to attend anyway since she said I already knew everything it
  contained, and that she would have went to Brian’s talk too if my talk
  was against it. She did however make a brief appearance at my talk, so
  I feel bad my post-talk chat with Brian made it impossible for me to do
  the same for her talk.
• I spoke extensively with Matt Kraai
  in the Debian booth. It
  was great to meet Matt for the first time, as he had previously
  volunteered on the
  Free Software Directory project
  when I was at FSF, and he’s also contributed a lot of development effort to
  BusyBox. It’s always strange but great
  to finally meet someone in person you’ve occasionally been in touch with
  for nearly a decade online.
• Don Armstrong was also in
  the Debian booth. I got to know Don when we served
  on one of the GPLv3
  discussion committees together, and I hadn’t been in touch with him
  regularly since the GPLv3 process ended. He’s continuing to do massive
  amounts of volunteer work for Debian, including being in charge of the bug
  tracking system! I asked him for some ideas in how to help Debian more,
  and he immediately mentioned
  the Debian/GNOME Bug
  Weekend coming up this weekend. I’m planning to get involved this
  weekend, and I hope others will too.
• Finally, I had a number of important meetings with lots of people in
  the FLOSS world, such as Tarus
  Balog, Michael
  Dexter, Bob
  Gobeille, Deb Nicholson,
  Rob Savoye
  and Randal Schwartz.
  Ok, enough name-dropping. (BTW, Tarus
  has written about his
  trip as well, and mentioned our ongoing copyright assignment debate.
  Tarus argues that he can do non-promise copyright assignment in OpenNMS
  and still avoid
  the normal
  Open Core shareware-like outcomes, which he dubs
  “fauxpen source” for “fake open source”. Time will
  tell.)

SCALE is really the gold standard of community-run, local FLOSS
conferences. It is the inspiration for many of the other regional
events such as OLF, SELF, and the like. A major benefit of these
regional events is that while they draw speakers from all over the
country, the average attendee is a local who usually cannot travel to
the better-known events like OSCON.