Summit 2007: The Summit ends. And not with a whimper.

The sun sets, bringing an end to another successful Summit.

Friday, final day of the Summit. My morning starts in Eben Moglen’s session on GPLv3. You’ll remember Moglen gave an unforgettable keynote address last year. This year his individual sessions give attendees the chance to ask questions directly. It’s no surprise that Moglen is as articulate and passionate responding to questions as he is with his prepared comments. His wit is sharp. And when he turns a phrase just right, he pauses and lets it hang in the air for a moment. The audience laughs. He deadpans. It’s brilliant.

Moglen’s session is followed by our own Greg DeKoenigsberg, speaking on open music and the state of the music industry. It’s true in music as in code, as Greg says, “Struggling proprietary industries provide opportunities for disruption by their open counterparts.” The music business is one such industry. Music production is becoming commoditized, allowing musicians to produce music cheaply and creating new music from existing music.

The ever-dapper Eben Moglen speaks at his Summit session.

Production has changed, delivery has changed, but the business hasn’t kept up. “Where there is pain there is opportunity.”

Greg works the crowd. He peppers his talk with one-liners, an Orson Welles impression, and palpable bitterness toward the car rental company that retrieved his car by mistake the night before. We’re even treated to a sample from Tamtam, the music production software on One Laptop Per Child.

In the third session of the morning, I dropped in on Jonathan Blandford’s well-attended and informative session on the Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5 desktop. The presentation covered new features, along with security, stateless, and systems management capabilities through Red Hat Network®–delivered by one of its most influential developers.

Greg DeKoenigsberg speaks about the music industry… and other things.

During lunch, Brian Stevens returned to honor the winners of the Red Hat Innovation Awards, then held the drawing to give away the Summit surfboard. Before the attendees were off to their final session, Stevens brought onstage Sara Jones, the Summit’s master event coordinator, to congratulate her for another fantastic event and to share one big round of applause on her behalf.

And with that the Summit is over.

It’s been a fast four days of introductions, inspiring keynotes, and amazing evening events.

Once again this year the Summit offered the unique chance to put faces and real people behind names and email aliases. To make new friends. To remind each other that technology is really about the people who use it.

Antonio never misses a Summit.

Once again it was a chance to see old friends, like Antonio, a systems administrator from Spain, who has now joined us for his third Summit. Looking forward to seeing you next time, Antonio, wherever the Summit takes us.

And once again this year, we are reminded that the open source movement has grown bigger and in more ways than we imagined, and the world a bit smaller.

This entry was posted by Jonathan Opp on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 1:12 pm and is filed under events. 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.