CPOSC 2009 Event Report

OK, so this one is a tad late. I went up to Harrisburg, PA at Harrisburg University downtown for CPOSC 2009 a few weeks back, and had a great time. I only attended two talks, the rest of the time was spent manning the Fedora booth.  The first talk that I went to was ostensibly a talk about licensing, however, the presenter didn't have his facts straight on basic licensing issues (not surprising, they're fairly complex. and only a masochist could know everything there is to know). For instance, he posited that all GPL'ed software may automatically be utilized under any version of the GPL, regardless of if the copyright holder expressed that right or not, which is obviously incorrect. He then got into a talk about how to monetize open source, not the type of talk that I was wanting to attend at all. Oh well, at least he tried, which is more than me :D

The next talk that I went to was about how to get involved in open source. One of my friends here in NYC could have actually benefited from this talk, but it's coaching that I've been giving him off and on anyways. It's a problem that I see far too often - people actually WANT to get involved, but there is no clear, hospitable point of entry for them. Most project websites have no clear path to entry for becoming a contributor, for example. This is an area that I think that Fedora has done an excellent job, our front page contains not only a prominent link for joinig the project, but clear and concise steps on what to do - sign up for a FAS account first off, and several suggestions for what you might want to do based on various types of people.

As for the booth itself, it was a smash - manning the booth was myself, Todd Zullinger, and Ben Boeckel. The vertical banners that we had thanks to Clint Savage were one of the hits of the show - the Ubuntu people really liked em. I got to talking with them about how things work with regard to brand outreach in Ubuntu, and I learned some things that were surprising and disturbing to me. First, this isn't a slight on the Pennsylvania LoCo, but rather on the entire state of affairs of Ubuntu brand outreach efforts. They had no professional looking banners, etc, and seemed generally ill-prepared. When I asked them about this, and told them that I had seen pretty impressive Ubuntu booths (this is in parituclar reference to our veritcal banners), he told me that "yeah, those are the shows that Canonical cares about. If it's a small show such as CPOSC, then they just leave it to the LoCo teams and give them basically no support". I found this pretty appalling, for a small investment, Ubuntu could also have a professional presence at shows around the country - it just requires them to do what we do, have a set of reusable infrastructure for a show, and ship it from place to place as is required.