I have safely made it back home from SCaLE 8x. Once again it was a great show. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see many talks since I was manning the OpenNMS booth, but the feedback I hear was that most of them were excellent. I really hate the fact that I missed seeing Brian Aker, although he posted some interesting comments on his blog about the show.

My Sunday keynote seemed to be well received. I was a little nervous – not because I was speaking in front of a large crowd, but because I like the show so much I didn’t want to disappoint. If you were unable to see it and are curious about my thoughts on starting an open source business, it is available via streaming on-line.

I made some new friends and after the show managed to spend some time with Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn. Bradley and I were able to continue our debate on copyright assignment, with me firmly in the camp of dual copyright and him warning that the potential for evil is still too high. I don’t think we changed each others mind any, but like any rational argument I hope that we each can see better into the others reasoning.

I always love the fact that user group and volunteer driven conferences like SCaLE seem to be better than the “professional” conferences I attend. I am looking forward to SELF in June, where we are a diamond sponsor. Jeff went last year and said it was great, but this will be my first time attending.

More importantly, I am getting more and more excited every day about the OpenNMS users conference in May. I couldn’t be happier with the speakers. The first day, with the exception of my talks, is completely made up of users of OpenNMS who can tell their stories of how they use it, why they like it, and how it makes their jobs easier.

The second day features some of the main developers of the project giving in-depth workshops on the internals of OpenNMS. If you ever wanted to get started customizing the software, this is the place to be.

Remember, early-bird registration is available at a discount and we are required to limit the number of attendees due to space constraints, so if you are interested in coming be sure to register early and often.

Hope to see you there, at SCaLE or at SELF. Be sure to stop by and say “hi”.