BERLIN -- Volker Grassmuck is playing the role of grand mediator in planning his Wizards of OS conference.
"Our goal is to bridge the gap between different worlds," he says.
The "OS," of course, stands for operating systems, and the conference theme will be the open source movement. Or, if you prefer, the free software movement.
Grassmuck, who has been planning the Wizards of OS for the better part of a year, is careful to give both terms equal play. Both Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates (who favors the former) and Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (who favors the latter) are invited speakers for the conference that runs Friday and Saturday.
But Grassmuck, who earned his doctorate in computer science from Berlin's Humboldt University -- one of the two primary conference sponsors -- has more divergent worlds in mind than those separated by mere terminology.
Besides dedicated geeks, Grassmuck invited economists, Net artists, politicians, and media theorists to exchange insights and examine the potential impact of open source in their own fields.
"Getting hackers, computer scientists, and people from cultural, economics, and political scenes into a dialogue with each other is, of course, a huge endeavor, and it will fail like so many others before," says Grassmuck. "But there are these rare moments when the circumstances are right and when the crossing of boundaries between disciplines succeeds."
Grassmuck points to cybernetics, the study of biological and artificial systems, as an example: It was born during World War II, when the fields of biology, communications, psychology, and systems theory came together in an unusual synthesis.
"FreeSoftware has the chance to trigger something like that," he says. It forces us to look anew at concepts such as authorship and ownership, at "the foundations of the knowledge order."
The other primary sponsor of the conference is a loosely defined but remarkably successful organization founded just over a year ago by a varied mix of artists, media activists, and writers.
Mikro has staged monthly evenings in a Berlin club that have at times expanded into week-long extravaganzas, such as last summer's meeting of net.radio makers from around the world.
Wizards of OS is Mikro's grandest project yet, and the signature of the organization is the political gist of the questions on the table: Are we now witnessing the great sellout of Linux and open source? Is open source an argument for a third sector of non-governmental organizations taking up the slack where the market and the state have failed? What role can free software play in allowing greater access to information in underdeveloped nations?
While the language at most conference sessions will be German, at least two will be conducted in English, and all the proceedings will be streamed live from the conference site. International viewers may be surprised to find so much open source buzz in Europe, since most media coverage focuses on developments in the United States.
But as Thomas Scoville observes in an article for O'Reilly, "It is clear Europe is already well ahead of the United States in open source utilization, culture, and awareness."
Grassmuck hopes to avoid any such "us-and-them opposition," but nevertheless emphasizes that the European reception to open source has been overlooked, both philosophically and practically.
Over 7,000 Linux enthusiasts showed for the fifth LinuxTag staged by Kaiserslautern University on the last weekend of June, for example, and Grassmuck can tick off the names of German open-sourcers like nobody's business, starting with Lars Eilebrecht of the Apache core group, Kalle Dalheimer, and half a dozen more.
Still, Grassmuck emphasizes that "free collaborative software projects living on the Internet, are in essence, global."
