OSCON Day 1 Keynotes

Today is the opening day of the Open Source Conference. After two good days of tutorials, I’m ready for diverse sessions on new and emerging topics.

This morning’s keynotes were presented by Tim O’Reilly and Robert Lefkowitz . I went into Tim’s keynote from a somewhat cynical place: of course Tim is the opening keynote for a conference his company is sponsoring, and of course he’s going to talk about his company’s “radar.” So here it is: I was wrong. Tim’s keynote, while not earth shattering, had a few interesting points regarding the commodotization of Open Source software and software components. Towards the end of his keynote, Tim laid out a set of challenges. His challenge to developers (I may be paraphrasing here) was to: * Napsterize the address book and the calendar * Rethink email and IM as social software * open source iSync clone and open standards for interchange * create federated identity systems

And the question I was asking myself when I saw this slide was, “is this Chandler ?” Doesn’t Chandler promise to provide “peer-to-peer” shared calendars and contacts? Doesn’t Chandler promise to define open standards for interoperation? And doesn’t Chandler intend to be a platform, not “just” an application? As far as I can tell, yes, yes, and, er, yes. It’s reassuring to see smart people coming up with the same ideas independently.