Wednesday
Duncan and I were again back at the Hall of Justice (my fourth such trip in three days) for a hearing before the Permits Section. We sat in the back of the hearing room, and when the officer in charge began the meeting, I was surprised to hear him call
Katina Bishop, itinerant show, loudspeaker, non-commercial, Golden Gate Park.
And sure enough, Katina Bishop herself stood up from her seat in the front of the room, walked up to the hearing committee's desk, and began talking to the committee members.
Katina is my co-worker at EFF, and I hadn't expected to see her at all; it so happened that she had applied for an amplified sound permit for the EFF Share-In concert, and her hearing came up the same day that our Free Dmitry march permit hearing did. So there we were in the very same hearing; it was a funny co-incidence.
Duncan was called up a little later (the process was alphabetical by last name), and so we had time in between to remark on how funny it had been to run into Katina in such a place. And then Duncan and I went up to the front and Duncan was asked "Are you Duncan MacKinnon?" and that was all that the Permits Section wanted to know.
Katina's permit, and our permit, were granted (this link won't work right away).
In the afternoon, Duncan and I dropped by the Linux Journal hospitality suite to check in with Don and make sure that BBCs were being passed around.
I spoke with the folks from the EtherBoot and LTSP projects about netbooting. They've both done impressive work that we might be able to benefit from in some way.
I also stopped by the Scyld booth to give out BBCs. People now or previously at Scyld are responsible for a lot of good things on the BBC -- Ethernet drivers and diagnostics, two-kernel monte, and now some forensics tools. They had a nice Beowulf demo with a rack-mountable array of servers running a simulation. Donald Becker showed up at one point, and I gave him some BBCs; apparently he liked them, because he stopped by the EFF booth later on to talk to Duncan for quite a while.
I ran into Kieran at the GNOME booth, and I talked to him about math for a while.
Alex Katalov and Dmitry Sklyarov of Elcomsoft attended the conference together. I didn't see either of them on the show floor, but other people did. One man who came by the EFF booth had a very special present which he asked me to pass on to Dmitry: a 1960 U.S. silver half-dollar, with an engraving of the Liberty Bell on the back. (I gave it to Alex later that evening.)
There was a Debian dinner (with some folks from Amsterdam and otherwise far away) at an Indian restaurant called New Delhi (on Ellis). I'd eaten there before; it was very good, although the main reason we chose it today was that it's physically the closest Indian restaurant to Moscone Center, according to Yahoo!.
As a result of going to dinner, we were a little bit late to the Allseer party.
The party was excellent. I met Raph Levien, maintainer of Ghostscript, creator of Advogato, and the person responsible for lots of other neat things, like the original remailer list.
Dmitry Sklyarov attended the party -- but he wasn't allowed to say much, or stay long. Lawrence Lessig gave a speech in which he talked about a death penalty case he encountered while working for Justice Scalia; he condemned the DMCA (as you might expect), and called on us to help in a long battle. Richard Stallman spoke next, and hit various points, ending in a call for campaign finance reform. (The following day, a free-sklyarov subscriber noted that Ernest Hollings receives a lot of money from lawyers and copyright industries -- more than from any other group.) Sometime I should write something about campaign finance.
Cindy Cohn, from EFF, gave the last speech; one audience member told Duncan that the speech was so inspiring that it made him want to cry. (That's your answer, Cindy, if you were wondering how you did.)
I also found two people at the party whom I'd met at the EFF booth and who were from Western Massachusetts! They were affiliated with schools in the Five College Consortium, and one of them actually had Prof. David Kelly as her advisor. (He's the director of the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, which I attended in 1993.) That woman was the one who danced with ribbons during the parade on Thursday.
It's great to meet people from back where I grew up! These two drove across the country together and are headed back at some point. I hope they'll say hi to Kelly for me.
I tried to paint "svobodu Dime" on the big banner which had been hung on the wall, but I got called away in the middle, and somebody else completed it, thinking I'd meant to write "svobodu Sklyarovu". Fair enough.
I stayed at the party for several hours and ran into a number of people from EFF, the Debian project, and local LUGs.
I checked Advogato before going to sleep, and noticed an article about LWCE's admissions policies, written by a 13-year-old programmer named Zach Lipton, who was denied admission to the show on Wednesday because of his age.
I immediately wrote the following message to Kathy Moran of IDG:
Hi Kathy,I had a very nice time in my conference session today, and I'm also enjoying working in the EFF booth. Thanks for the opportunity to be a part of LWCE again.
I wanted to let you know about something I noticed on Advogato, a community web site run by Raph Levien of UC Berkeley:
http://www.advogato.org/article/331.html
This article, by open source programmer Zach Lipton, describes how he was turned away from LWCE today because he is 13 years old, even though he came to the show accompanied by an adult. I find this troubling.
Today, I'm 21, have worked full-time in the technology world for three years, have presented at three LWCE shows, and have been interviewed about technology issues by national media.
I remember my first trade show experience -- at the age of 15, I attended a non-IDG networking show on the East Coast. I attended with friends aged 15, 16, and 30, two of whom were working as computer consultants. Many of the engineers present had substantive and valuable technical discussions with us, about firewalls, routers, and cryptography. Unfortunately, some vendors treated us disrespectfully because of our age. I found this counterintuitive -- I was already working on IT infrastructure projects at my high school, and expected to be working with computers professionally within the next two to three years. (And, as it turned out, that prediction was accurate.) Why should those vendors want to alienate their future customers?
After all, some enthusiastic technologists are very young, and many young people are already doing significant technical work before they enter high school or college. This is especially true in the open source/free software community. A number of accomplished developers I know are teenagers, who often got started working with Linux when they were 12 or 13. (I started at 15; a major contributor to the LNX-BBC project, which was the subject of my talk on Tuesday, is 16 at the moment, and does superb technical work.)
One result of LWCE's age policies seems to be that properly-registered programmers who contribute to major open source/free software projects aren't able to attend the show and discuss their work with their colleagues. According to Mr. Lipton's web site, he works as a programmer on the Mozilla web browser.
I understand that IDG is concerned that young people could be disruptive to the show, and that exhibitors may not be particularly excited about speaking with attendees who are not yet computer professionals. On the other hand, my experience suggests that young people who are interested in attending trade shows are very likely to become computer professionals, often within the next few years. After all, there's a reason that these people are trying to get into your show!
The free software/open source world is full of enthusiastic and talented young people who are taking the opportunity to make connections and contributions they're likely to continue through their academic and professional lives. I would urge IDG to try to find a way to let these people participate in LWCE.
(Zach was subsequently admitted to the show; I think the issue still remains, and I'm glad to hear that IDG will be considering it.)
