Day four of the conference opened with a keynote entitiled “Hackers at the End of the World” by Glyn Moody. Glyn explored the history of sharing in science and art as inspired by the open source movement, and contrasted this with the anti-sharing ‘my gain is your loss’ culture of the global financial community. Glyn postulated that the sharing and indeed sharing of sharing that characterises the FOSS community held a tantalising glimpse of a solution to the global financial and environmental crisis.
Jeremy Allison brought forward an extremely provocative look at Microsoft’s overtures to the open source community with “The Elephant in the Room – Microsoft and Free Software”. Jeremy took the audience through Microsoft’s duality in recent times in attempting to reconsile with the open source community at the same time working against them in the political and regulartory arena.
