I was at the Paris JUG second anniversary yesterday where I presented "XWiki.org vs XWiki.com". This 15 minute talk was about the relationship that can exist between an open source project and a company behind that open source project. How to keep the company "honest" so that it doesn't do "evil" but still function as a company, i.e. make money and grow.
The event was great and here are some of the salient point I took out from it:
- It's great to see that the Java community is alive and kicking. Imagine: drawing close to 500 people at a JUG event! Well done Antonio and team.
- Very good keynote from Sacha Labourey on whether open source has come of age and the good and the surprises that happened. The presentation has resonated with my convictions at XWiki. It was also very nice to see Marc Fleury again, as a surprise guest, especially since he's now onto other stuff.
- Great presentation from Marc-Antoine Guarrigue on how he discovered computers and how we he came to become an open source developer working on JCaptcha and more. I thank Marc-Antoine for considering me as one of the person he took example on. The truth is Marc-Antoine is a great guy, humble and with a big heart, and very skilled at whatever he does. I also wish I could present as well as he did! Congrats again to MAG for his newborn baby Louise who apparently already likes drinking champagne
- I liked the Play! framework concepts. Actually I found a lot of similarities from what we do in XWiki. I especially like the attention to details that they've put into their project, like the nice error reporting pinpointing the part of the source code failing. It was nice to talk to Guillaume Bort and Nicolas Leroux afterwards. Nicolas is a Riveria JUG leader and XWiki SAS is hosting its wiki. He reminded me that we really need to upgrade the XWiki JUG's farm to a more recent version (it's more than a year's old and in the meantime we've had about 15 releases!).
- I didn't know about jax-doclet before. Since we use JAX-RS in XWiki we'll have a look at it in order to document our REST APIs. It looks promising.
- I was happy to meet again Fred Do Couto who was providing Massages throughout the event (thanks for the "Amma Assis" Massage Fred!). Fred has started a company called VitaliZen doing Massages at events. He's still doing IT consulting while he bootstraps his business. Well done Fred, I admire you and the courage it takes to start a new endeavour especially as different as the one you were doing before. Great to see you were able to leverage those Massage sessions that we've had when we worked together for Vizzavi Europe back in 2001...
- 3 out of 4 castcodeurs were present at the event. For once it was Guillaume Laforge missing and not me! Emmanuel Bernard and I had a good talk with Didier Girard about how we could increase our castcodeurs podcast audience from the current 1500 recurrent auditors to more. Didier had some great ideas and he came back to us today with a full page list of new ideas he's had while sleeping overnight on it! (Remember that he probably went to bed around 3 or 4 in the morning so that's a major feat!)
- I was surprised to meet someone who's been knowing my name for a while but whom I had never met... Bernard Pons has been working at Societe Generale on the Progeliance Net code I wrote back in 1999 (you read it right, this is old! And it's still in production!). He had seen my name in @author tags all around the code... And he made me remember things I wish I had not written at the time... like stealing the Comparator interface written by Joshua Bloch and copying it into the codebase, removing his name and putting "@author vincent massol" instead... (remember it was JDK 1.1 or 1.2 and there was no Collections APIs in the JDK at the time). Did I really do that?
- Met with Emmanuel Huggonet, leader of the Alps JUG who's kindly invited me to talk in October (I'll be stopping by at the Lyon JUG for a talk there too - Thanks Cédric).
- Was happy to see my friend Benjamin Mestrallet back from the states. Ludovic Dubost and I talked to Benjamin about the XWiki Business Model and interesting ideas emerged...
+ met and discussed with the numerous fellow OSSGTP-ers whom I was happy to see, as always.
All in all, it was great and I had a wonderful time. I don't regret having had to come out of my cave in Chantilly to go to Paris...
See you next year for the 3 years!
