Joa Ebert on the beach

FOTB tickets: 150 pounds.
Crappy hotel by the beach: 147 pounds.
Coffee + incredibly moist chocolate cake for breakfast: 2.5 pounds.
Watching a guy embarrass a multi-billion company in 1 hour: so very fucking priceless.

This year's FOTB will be remembered as "yes, the year that Joa Ebert..." FOTB. His session was without a doubt the best of the 3 days and if you feel bad for not going, imagine the people that did go to FOTB but didn't go to the session.

Because it's taken me a week to write this post (went to Spain after FOTB, came back yesterday, waking up today at 6am wasn't funny), I'm not going to talk much about every single thing that went on like Richard Lord and frameworks, Mike Jones and Flex 4, Colin Moock doesn't read books when he gets into new things (funny!), AIR 2.0 improvements, etc. and will only talk about this:

++ Joa Ebert

His session was on Tuesday 22nd September, let's see how long does it take Adobe to put his optimizations into the nightly builds of the Flex SDK compiler. Because fair enough if your compiler can be improved, but there will be NO EXCUSE to not use Joa's code. Luckily for us, it seems Adobe is taking it the good way.

The bright side of things is that, without refactoring any code, current applications can improve performance just by running his optimizations. Or from another angle: the AVM2 is faster than we all thought. Can't wait to hear from all the people squeezing the ass of the player: Papervision and all the 3D engines to begin with, but also image encoders/decoders and other CPU intensive tasks.

++ Open Source rocks

I was very, very happy to see how almost all the big names were finishing their presentations saying: "... and yeah, all these amazing things I do you can download already from this URL...".

Specially remarkable was Joel Gethin Lewis that said, and I quote:

I think that selling software is immoral

How cool :)

If you are of those who think that he's a communist and his approach is taking Open Source too far, then at least check out this other quote:

All my work is released as Open Source and I don't give a shit about people ripping it. I've done it, had fun with it and made my money already. I'm not interested any more in the things I've done, go and get them. I'm interested in the next thing I'm going to build.

Awesome mindset. And he's not kidding, here's his repo.

We are not talking about a nerd in his apartment, we are talking about very successful people working for very big companies. They know their work would be 10x harder without the gazillion OS libraries out there and they think it's only fair to contribute back as payment. So do I. Let alone the practical point of view of getting other people "to work for you". Ask Carlos Ulloa what Papervision was before releasing it. It was re-written and ported to AS3 in the first 3 months. And you cannot do that alone. Neither PPV nor Carlos would be anywhere near successful as they are now if Carlos would have kept it for himself only.

Open Frameworks, Merapi, Apparat, ASAXB (do NOT miss out the TV ad)... So if you think your code is so valuable that has to be kept locked, think again. Unless you are doing cooler things than these guys your code is not worth keeping closed (and probably not even then). And yes, I know that telling clients that you are going to release their sources sounds like utopia, we had a long chat about that, but I'll leave that discussion for another post.

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And that's it. For me it's been the best FOTB so far, if only for the people there! Cay, Diego, Diego, Carlos, the rest of the UsTwo crew and some of the guys of the haXe list made the 4 days very geeky and fun.

Already waiting for FOTB 2010 : )