googleNYC Speaker Series: Chris Dibona

Just came over to googleplexNYC for the tail end of the Open Source Talk at google with Chris Dibona (his website, company project site) and discussed about google's contributions to the open source community. Interesting to me, while I missed the opening of the talk, Chris is incredibly friendly and affable with everyone who comes to the microphone asking all sorts of questions. My best part of the presentation has been Chris' answers to some of the questioners:

1. What is the favorite thing you would like to be coding?
   Chris has not coded in majorly in five years - his wife often suggests, "why don't you code this weekend?"
2. What can we do to help out if we are not good coders?
   We need good writers, lawyers (Software Free Law Association), bug reporters
   
3. How is a person like "me" (a hipster artist looking for visibility) going to benefit from open source? I use WordPress, is that open source?
4. Can you tell us how many exist in google?
   I can not give any specific numbers about .
5. How can you teach people how to participate in the open-source community if you are creating a new open-source project?
   Ed Note: I will have to look at the YouTube site for the replay of this presentation for the answers
6. Open Source Applications
   I see slow adoption of the open-source Linux desktop.
7. What extent are the google apps going to be open-source?
   Not easy - the infrastructure is almost prohibitive and we need to maintain the code base. but we are investigating portability of the applications at some time, but I can not say much more.
8. I think being a manager teaches you to code in "memo"
   

Interesting conversation and very accessible. Will have more when I see the YouTube video.