ONLamp: The State of Open Source

“The night that divides the two days of tutorials from the
three-day conference at the fifth annual O’Reilly Open Source
Convention is reserved for the States of the Union addresses.
Luminaries from the open source communities of Perl, Python, PHP,
MySQL, Apache, and Linux each spoke for just under a half hour to
present their take on the current state of their technology and
where it is headed.

“Larry Wall kicked off the evening with an entertaining look at
what he called the Universal architectural diagram. Looking much
like the court markings on one side of a tennis court, the diagram
was filled in a variety of ways during a lightning session of
political, cultural, religious, and geek references. In one
version, the base of the rectangle was Parrot and the three
vertical rectangles that sat on top of it were filled with
languages that would run on this single engine. The left rectangle
held Perl 5, the middle Perl 6, and the right contained a large
list of languages that included PHP, Ruby, Python, BASIC, Scheme,
COBOL, and Java. Wall explained that currently only BASIC is
supported and wondered if this larger goal is really
impossible…”

Complete
Story