You know what I love about open source?
That we can name a conference something a little awkward like “Open Source Bridge”, and no marketing department stops us.
There’s a project called Drizzle, that was forked from a commercial company and a team of what traditionally might be considered competitors ran with it. We can call a project PMS, and my friends will laugh but still review the code.
I’m running this conference because I love free and open source software. I want the way that we write code to dominate software development – I want it to become the default. I want “open source” to be synonymous with “software development”.
And of course, I think everyone should have the freedom to look at and tinker with the source code of the applications they depend on. Ultimately, we’ll prove that it’s better for society, even if we still have some learning to do around how to produce the best software, with the best user interfaces and documentation to go along with our code.
Which sort of brings me to why I think this particular conference is so important. The human aspect of software development — why we do what we do, how we communicate with each other and where we do our work are all critically important aspects of the open source ecosystem.
Portland is an amazing place – we’re overflowing with tech events every night of the week. I can’t keep up with our user groups because there are just too damn many of them. It’s amazing to see our community flourish, and we want to show you how we’re doing it.
Not just to show off. Well, ok. Maybe a little.
We want you to learn from us and go back to your town and start your own crazy tech scene. Set up calendars, meet up with people for lunch, dinner, beer and #afterhours hacking. Make spaces to create, express yourself and publish the code.
Do what we do. But not because I say so. Come see what we’re up to, first-hand.
(Image courtesy Aylaleia. Used under Creative Commons.)
