G’morning from the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, where we’re all gathering for the second day of She’s Geeky. It looks like there is a completely different crowd of people here than yesterday, which should make things really interesting.

Session one – Open source. Really interesting, a lot of women talking about wanting to be more involved in open source, even voting software open (iiinteresting). It seems like a lot of us use it, but we’re not involved so much in the creation of it, although we’d like to be.

I’m certainly guilty of that, I use firefox, open office, gaim, I’m learning ruby, but I’ve done a lot more work in the open STANDARD world vs open SOFTWARE.

(ok, comical moment, session just moved next to us, telling us that “they couldn’t hear where they were, so they were moving over here.” soooo, they’re moving here and then we can’t hear? confuzzled)

Interesting conversation around the tendency for companies to release part of their code and call themselves “open source,” for example, AIM is partly open. PARTLY. Second Life is also partly open, you can grab their viewer code. But is that truly open??

Then again, where is the business model around open source? Back to the voting software concept, of course they couldn’t fully open their code. They could open part, then branch their own for the voting machines, but isn’t that extra development time on their part?

There is no perfect answer. You could maybe save development time by using plug and play modules, but I’ve personally seen project roadmaps blown out to all hell because the devs insisted on open source. You could also end up in a nasty position if you’re using proprietary code you can’t tweak.

From there, our conversation turned a bit more into what I suppose people would expect at a conference called “She’s Geeky” – what is it like for WOMEN in these situations. I believe I could, and probably should, write a huge blog entry on that topic, but since it’s time for the next session….that’s for later.