dave.ofmassdestruction.com

I went to go hear Bob Young talk today at UNC (mp3 already available!). I can’t say how many times I’ve heard Bob talk over the years but I wanted to go say hello since I haven’t seen him in quite a while.

I love hearing Bob talk – its always so relaxed and informal – and hilarious. Some things never change. So while I didn’t learn much new about Bob or his accomplishments, it was great fun to get taken on the nostalgia train back to the pre-IPO days of Red Hat when Bob took us all for an amazingly fun ride.

Bob did spend a bit of time talking about copyrights and patents (and the inherent evils of our politicians not understanding the benefits of public domain and the commons) and it made me wish to hear someone give a very focused talk on such things especially in relation to universities and the revocation of the law that made all university research public domain material. Perhaps I will expound on that soon.

Bob also gave ample praise to Paul Jones and ibiblio – I couldn’t agree more with the praise.

My apologies to Paul and my good friends at ibiblio for not having seen this page earlier, but it is the ibiblio speaker series which includes a schedule of upcoming talks and videos of previous talks. Wow, there is some good stuff here! I got this from Paul reminding folks that Bob Young is due to speak on the 30th. I can’t remember the last time I saw Bob, it will be great to reconnect. If you are local and are going, let me know – I’ll be there!

Check out some of the older talks – a lot of goodness: My main man Fred talks about Facebook, Dan Gillmor on grassroots journalism, Jimmy Wales on wikipedia, etc etc. I knew most of these happened – but seeing them all in one place I am really impressed with Paul’s speaker booking abilities. Kudos Paul!