The opening reception

July 25, 2000
J. Corbet

The conference threw a well-attended evening reception, with, of course, free beer. It had its serious side, though, when Hugh Daniel gave a hard-hitting talk about the DMCA, Dmitry Sklyarov, and the need for free software developers to pay far more attention to politics. Things will only get uglier if we ignore them.

Hugh also had some choice words to say about the ease of use and documentation of most free software out there. It's not enough to produce programs that are good enough for developers; World Domination depends on making it good enough for the wider world.

Lots of O'Reilly books were given away to attendees. There were, however, four copies of Linux Device Drivers, Second Edition which somehow vanished before the giveaway began. One can only hope that they are being put to good use, rather than being found by a conference center cleanup person under some table somewhere...

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