Tech Presentations

Presentation about current state of Mono and why it’s an important project for Linux community. Presented by Miguel de Icaza who is employed by Novell and in addition to Mono fame is also known for creating GNOME desktop for Linux.

Given at FOSDEM 2007 on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 (video, ogg, ~300Mb).

Presentation actually changed my impression of Mono being an evil seed of MS .NET monster into Linux – in reality it looks like it’s a way to make huge amount of MS .NET developers easily port their apps to Linux. With a huge amount of apps running on Mono without modification. Right now it’s 11% and by the end of summer he expects that to be about 60%, plus another 25% of apps to be easily portable to be cross-platform (about a week of work each).

I can’t say I’m overly optimistic, but it’s one of the moves that can give Linux much better chance.

As one of showcases, he also talks about Second Life migrating their LSL scripting language to Mono and gaining huge performance savings.

P.S. I wish they had BitTorrent set up for those videos.

Presentation by Jim Gettys at FOSDEM 2007 about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project given on Saturday February 24^th, 2007 (video, ogg, 246Mb).

This is interesting video from both hardware/software and social perspectives. And when I’m saying social, I don’t only mean charity point of view, which is important for us to always keep in mind, but also it’s important to understand that social aspects of such projects can be very important factors in defining technical side of things.

At the very end of the speech, Jim is saying thank you to all Open Source developers for their work over many years without which OLPC would not be possible. And in my view, that’s a side of Open Source that is quite often forgotten behind the hype of free (as beer) software or killing Microsoft dominance – it’s about greater good that this movement is bringing to the world, next step in evolution of thinking.