How does Open Source affect the future of the software industry? Is the future of software primarily open source? Has Open Source "won"? Do we need to promote Open Source more? Instead of focusing on the technical details about open source should we concentrate on the bigger broader picture of society and DRM and the debate about re-mixing, and future of music, video and art on the internet?

These and other topics were the focus of the Future of Free and Open Software panel which was held as a free event open to the public as part of the Vancouver PHP 2007 conference. I really enjoyed the discussion. We're lucky to have FOSS experts in Vancouver like David Ascher and Zak Greant and Bruce Byfield who have a worldwide reputation, know everybody in the community and can get them out to the Vancouver PHP conference which has attracted experts from around the world as well as our great local talent.

Check out the Google Video for the first 42 minutes of the panel.

Now that Roland has posted some videos (intro, me jumping up and down about CCK), I better get these notes up!

From my point of view, it was a great first meetup, and thanks to the Vancouver PHP Users Group for co-presenting. There are actually two Drupal forums on vancouver.php.net, so a good place to keep notes -- I'll cross post the relevant bits there. That is, before the mega-site of groups.drupal.org gets set up.

We did an intro around the room where everyone talked a little bit about what they're working on. It was a good mix of users and developers. Doug Gough had before the meetup talked about maybe collaborating on some tutorials or screencasts -- this is a great goal for user groups, I think, to actually work together on something. Actually, I think Doug needed a module coded for his school, so that might be something else that the group works on together.

After doing the intro, I did a demo of Drupal's Content Construction Kit, aka CCK. The project page is here and works on the 4.7 beta, but reading the background info is better to get an idea of what it does/where it's headed. In a nutshell, to make it easier to define custom data types directly through the browser without programming. I also ranted about the Views module, which lets you slice and dice all the content in your site and show it in different ways.

Now that Roland has posted some videos (intro, me jumping up and down about CCK), I better get these notes up!

From my point of view, it was a great first meetup, and thanks to the Vancouver PHP Users Group for co-presenting. There are actually two Drupal forums on vancouver.php.net, so a good place to keep notes -- I'll cross post the relevant bits there. That is, before the mega-site of groups.drupal.org gets set up.

We did an intro around the room where everyone talked a little bit about what they're working on. It was a good mix of users and developers. Doug Gough had before the meetup talked about maybe collaborating on some tutorials or screencasts -- this is a great goal for user groups, I think, to actually work together on something. Actually, I think Doug needed a module coded for his school, so that might be something else that the group works on together.

After doing the intro, I did a demo of Drupal's Content Construction Kit, aka CCK. The project page is here and works on the 4.7 beta, but reading the background info is better to get an idea of what it does/where it's headed. In a nutshell, to make it easier to define custom data types directly through the browser without programming. I also ranted about the Views module, which lets you slice and dice all the content in your site and show it in different ways.

I gave this presentation [PDF] at the Vancouver PHP Users Group this evening. I actually really wasn't happy with the first part of the presentation...I genericized large chunks of it, shying away from naming specific web technologies. But, this past weekend I dove into the world of Greasemonkey, and I really felt it had a place in any presentation on Web 2.0, so I had a whole section at the end devoted to it.

The reference to a "layer cake" is really talking about the different components that work together in web applications. This might be in a single application -- the Apache-MySQL-PHP (or AMP) that is quite common -- or it might be different services and content all mixed together. Greasemonkey provides another, richer layer.