Good points, but I still think that open source suffers because of the lack of a economic model that fits application developers. Open source is good for the big dogs ("cloud", "enterprise") - not so good for the garage guys. I think the status quo will self-correct if the economic incentive can be tilted. How about an open source license that only allows distribution to other license holders?

I've found a bunch of useful software there that has been abandoned and not been moved to Github. Why shut it down? They could've made one guy have a part time job watching over it, and kept the stuff running on Azure.

It's 2017. Everything should be running in VMs, and snapshots of those VMs should've been backed up. Guess the IT department wasn't up to scratch.

Considering all the technology Facebook has accrued directly and through partners a phone with a lot of nice features should be possible for them to implement. It's also a logical next step. Phones are social nodes in themselves, and mapping the Facebook 'world-in-a-world' onto this should be possible.

It could even be data-only if they wanted to (wifi/data traffic), but I don't think they would take it that far.

Technology mapping from the Facebook's technology chest to the mobile:
Text messaging - Replaced/complemented by Facebook Messenger
Audio chat - Integrated Skype version
Video chat - Integrated Skype version (Technology now in the hands of MS/Skype. Apple has shown us that this is feasible)
Group video chat / audio chat - Integrated Skype version.
Status of your friends reflected on your phone (Eg. approx. location, busy, last locations visited).
Contact list - Facebook friends.

Saw a presentation of the new Aruba 3 OS last week, and also got a demo of the AirWave used in the Aruba headquarter. This is a very good solution if you want to have full control and it's an event that you want to have control over and maybe have them on a regular basis. Could be that it's an overkill for this kind of event, but take a look here http://www.airwave.com/resources/demos/ to get a some new thoughts. It can also give you a heatmap of the coverage of all your AP's around in the event area.

I believe Google can do a lot of damage if the data they've been collecting somehow got in the wrong hands. For the public Google is a black box: You really don't know how much of what you put in, stay in. Relevant quote: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Everyone knows that most of the students sit up all night slashdotting, playing WoW, facebooking, digging. The night is the best time to have some "quality time" with you and your computer!