I haven’t collected many autographs in my life. In high school, my quartet had a chance to sing the Blackbird Medley with the Acoustix; they signed a CD for us. In grad school, I had the opportunity to meet Steve Jackson, and spent half-a-day geeking out over LEGO Mindstorms robots and giving him a tour of Indiana’s virtual reality environment; I asked him to sign my copy of Car Wars. While presenting at USENIX a few weeks ago, David Brin gave the closing invited talk, and I asked him to sign my name badge. Those are, to the best of my (flawed) memory, the only signatures I’ve ever collected.
While I didn’t seek it out this new set of signatures, that doesn’t diminish the awesomeness of the gift. The POSSE organizers got OSS authors to sign a copy of Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software. And there are a lot of signatures.
A critical lesson from today is that these projects are open, and we can take part. The barriers to entry are low. That said, I know what kind of effort goes into the little corners of the open source world that I’m part of (occam-pi and the Transterpreter, providing support for Untyped)—many of these people are associated with projects that I use to get things done on a daily basis. That’s really humbling.
Overall, very, very cool.