The day began with an nice intro by Tim O’Reilly, founder of the O’Reilly company. He talked about what open source was and how it has changed over the years. He talked about his feelings on open source licenses and how they are becoming obsolete with the introduction of new web-based software applications.

The first session of the day wasn’t too great - the speaker was very hard to understand, the room was too big, and the font-size on his presentation was too small. He didn’t really talk about how to solve the problems he spent the session describing.

The next session was much better and things started to pick up. I attended an excellent overview of the advanced features of the Prototype javascript library. I asked if the speaker had any recommended documentation sources and his response was “honestly, just read through the source code. I assure you it’s the best place to learn.” While not totally what I wanted to hear, he’s right.

I strolled around the exhibit hall and collected ten free shirts, pens, mints, blah blah. I even got a hat - I don’t really wear hats but who turns down a free hat? OSCON provided a nice lunch and while I was eating I met Ian from Ottawa, Canada. He works with the Eclipse foundation, though I didn’t learn what exactly he does. We spent most of the time talking about Portland and how nice it is to have such a large conference here every year.

After lunch I attended some more sessions. I have always read books, articles, and the blog of Chris Shifflet so it was great to see him in person finally. He’s a great speaker so I’m excited for another presentation of his tomorrow. After another PHP session with Wez Furlong I strolled through the exhibit hall again and then attended the Firefox Flicks screening. I got to chat for a while with Asa Dotzler who I’ve also been reading a lot of material from.

We saw some of the best entires into the firefox flicks contest and I was lucky enough to score a DVD of those entries afterward. I also asked about the possibility of getting one of the better ones an actual broadcast spot, which seems to me to be a great chance to get Firefox into the minds of average computer users.

I finally lugged all my collected swag back home at ten and got to bed around midnight. I have several software and document DVDs to sort through and my bookmarks list has twenty new entries that I have to find time to revisit later. One aspect of conferences that didn’t occur to me is how much time will be spent doing more research into the topics summarized in the sessions.

I took pics which I’ll put up sometime soon. Tomorrow is another day!