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August 22, 2004
EuroFoo - Day 2
Good morning from Enschede. After a short night (there was a very loud student party on the campus that kept me awake), we're gathering for the morning sessions. Due to a flakey WLAN connection I may not be able to post this until I get back.
Another quote heard this morning "this is my first O'Reilly conference where there hasn't been a book stand where you can buy O'Reilly books". Actually this shows the perhaps greatest misconception about Foo here when I compare it to the notes on the US version. This isn't supposed to be a conference. But one of the main criticisms is that it has still been to much like a conference. I talked to some of the O'Reilly people and they were remarking that the subjects at the US Foo camp are in general "more geeky".
First session for me is "Social software in the enterprise". Allan Engelhardt is talking about the various aspects of "selling" social software tools to commercial entities and how to bring the different schools of thought (KM, social networks, collaboration, integration) into line with the philosophy behind social software. Some bullet points from his talk: Knowledge is a social construct not just content to be managed. Collaboration is not natural. One way to enable enterprise integration is to create feeds and then use tools such as aggregators and discovery style technology (e.g. Technorati).
Now listening to Tim O'Reilly talk about book sales and how this reflects on technology trends. O'Reilly gets their data from BookScan which registers all the book sales in the US. In the programming book section, Java and VB are losing market share, while C# and PHP are increasing their share. C++/C is very steady over the last year. In the database section, MySQL an SQL server books are gaining in share while Oracle is losing. Comparing Java to .Net reveals that between the 3rd and 4th quarter, .Net books overtook Java and now .Net has around 52% and Java 48%. The total share of Open Source programming languages is 70% compared to proprietary programming languages. The Mac has 3% market share - but in books has 25%.
EuroFoo finished for me with a discussion on commercial adoption of Open Source. Only a few people came (it was the last slot unfortunately) but the discussion was good and it made a nice ending to a very interesting weekend. I'm going to let it all sink in and then post some pictures and additional thoughts later.
Posted by Matthew at August 22, 2004 09:59 AM