Joe@Nitobi

OpenWebVancouver was a very interesting conference. It’ll be interesting to see all the presentations, and I enjoyed the Google Gears presentation, as well as the other presentations. I also liked the RIA with Open Standards presentation, as well as the keynotes by both Zak Graent and Tim Bray. I wish I could have seen the merb presentation again, and I regret missing Microformats, but I had other obligations in the afternoon that caused me to miss those presentations.

My presentation seemed to have gone fairly well. We introduced DogOnRails and talked about OpenMesh, Meraki and FON. I think that my criticism of the lack of openness on their part is valid. However, I’m hoping that people understand that the reason we don’t use Open-Mesh’s dashboard is more to do with our users data and less to do with the people involved. If Open-Mesh.com was in Canada, we would consider using it, but since it’s in the US, and we’re dealing with people’s data, we don’t. I have no problems with Open-Mesh.com as a company per se, I have problems with data about which users are in what area of town being stored in the United States and being subject to the PATRIOT act, and other intrusive laws. The data is really the key behind our decision to keep FreeTheNet’s auth servers in Canada under our control, since while MAC addresses and geographical locations may seem pretty mundane to most people, it’s scary enough that we take privacy seriously. We’ll still buy hardware from Open-Mesh.com, but we’ll use our own version of the firmware, since we all agree on Open Hardware and Open Standards.

My presentation should be uploaded sometime in the next couple of weeks, and people can check back to the OpenWebVancouver site to check it out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 12:21 pm and is filed under GPL, Linux, VONIC, openwebvan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.