Free Software Linux

Last week, while I was on vacation meeting my new nieces and attending my 20th year high school reunion, the Panel Picker for SXSW 09 went live. Although voting by prospective attendees is only “about 30%” of the decision making process, I figured I should promote my submissions here, and hope that readers of this blog might be interested in commenting on them or voting for them in the panel picker. (Although they call it the panel picker - no one can resist alliteration - it includes sessions which are solo speakers or dual speakers as well as more tradition 4-5 person panels).

At OSCON yesterday Dave Recordon, of Six Apart, announced a new nonprofit organization. The Open Web Foundation has been created to support the development and protection of non-proprietary specifications for Web technologies. According to their website, "the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification."

This morning David Recordon formally announced the Open Web Foundation in a morning keynote at OSCON. (The shorter url openweb.org will come at somepoint). The OWF tagline / elevator statement is “The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.” The OWF goals, from their home page: Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

Yesterday at OSCON I had the pleasure of announcing the 2008 Frank Willison award. This was instituted by O'Reilly in memory of their editor in chief, whose "Frankly Speaking" column was a regular joy on the web: guaranteed to entertain and inform. Frank was a great supporter of Python, and a believer in the value of communities.