Wired on Friday:It's around 2am, Central European Time. Appropriately, I'm in Central Europe: the Berliner Congress Centre, in the Neighbourhood Formerly Known as East Berlin. Outside, on the Alexanderplatz, it has been snowing, leaving a fine powder on a small rocket ship parked outside the building.
The space ship, a sculpture, is a sign to the hundreds of participants gathering in the middle of the night that they've reached the right place - among their fellow hackers at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress.
The 23C3 is the annual gathering of the Chaos Computer Club, the longest-running and largest hacker organisation in Europe. The CCC has made headlines for all its life - usually involving its tradition of exposing security flaws in everything from the Bundesbank to Swiss banks. The event still attracts some 4,000 of the brightest and wildest figures in the computing world, who gather to demonstrate, talk and work upon their latest projects. Not all of them are exposés of security holes. While the business world struggles to understand and exploit the innovations of the Web 2.0 world, it's here at events like the 23C3 that the next revolutions are being whittled from the raw material of smart hackers and new technology.
At 2am, I'm witnessing just that. I'm standing beside a few makeshift desks and chairs, with ethernet networking cable strung all around. Next to me, millionaires and college students are working together, alternating eating from Indian takeaway in polystyrene boxes and peering at a tiny screen from a livid green laptop. They, like their fellow CCC participants, are working on enthusiast projects here: in this case, working on getting a new piece of free software to work on a brand new platform.
The software and the hardware represent two parallel wings of what could be the next revolution we should expect. The hardware is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) device: a dayglo green artifact from MT's Media Lab that looks more like a children's toy than a modern PC, but conceals a flurry of innovations - not least its price tag of under $120 (€93) for a fully working, general purpose computer.
The OLPC is intended to be a real product, distributed to children in developing countries by education ministries. Orders have already been tentatively placed by Brazil, Argentina and Libya, but the machine itself is still a prototype.
The hardware itself is a brave step away from the "faster, bigger, better" philosophy of mainstream laptops. It contains no moving parts - including no hard drive - but consequently is tougher and longer-lived than traditional laptops. It is relatively slow - but its screen is designed to be one of the sharpest and highest resolutions viewable in direct sunlight.
It has a microphone and a webcam, as well as a graphics tablet, mousepad and wireless mesh networking hardware.
Its appearance at the CCC is due as much to the software that will run on it as the hardware. The OLPC is entirely powered by free, open-source software.
The reasoning is a question of politics and philosophy more than pricing.
The OLPC is designed to follow the "constructionist" theory of education (where children learn by doing and experiencing), which means that its creators wanted every level of the machine to be tinkerable, explorable and configurable by a curious child. Both Microsoft and Apple offered their operating systems for free for the project, but were turned down in preference to open software that could be manipulated and improved upon by the OLPC's own users.
That's an attractive proposition to CCC's hackers. Back in 1981, when the Chaos Computer Club first emerged, it was the political impact of open computers and communication networks that drove its growth. At the time, even owning an unlicensed computer modem was illegal in West Germany. The CCC's founders, meeting at Berlin's left-leaning newspaper Die Tageszeitung, created the club to encourage the use of information technology to open society and liberate individuals. Exploring the explorable, and breaking it open when it's not, is what they do.
The people huddled over the OLPC here are using the open nature of the OLPC to demonstrate another disruptive approach. The software they're trying to boot is a free version of Adobe's Flash player, the application that lets you run movies, animations and multimedia on sites from YouTube to Bebo.
Flash is one of the most widely used pieces of software in the world, but most coders are banned from working on competitors to it by the licence on its development kit software. It's also proprietary: that means that while most of us download it for free, new computer hardware and embedded systems sellers (like OLPC), generally have to pay for it to be installed on their machines.
It's the opposite of tinkerable: legally and monetarily, you can't mess with the Flash player.
Which is a shame, because Flash remains one of the best mediums for artists and designers to bring their works to life online.
For them, paying a few hundred dollars to Adobe for a fully featured creation studio that creates works that run identically on almost every computer that is used to view the web is a small price to pay.
Hence this huddle: Rob Savoy is the creator of Gnash, a free reimplementation of Flash, painstakingly coded by developers who've never agreed to Adobe's licence.
He has travelled here from Colorado, and for his Christmas holiday is working for free to get it running on the OLPC.
Eventually, after hours of midnight coding, the code runs. Flash movies work on the OLPC.
It's a milestone for the children who might use the One Laptop Per Child, as it means they'll be able to view Flash content.
Better still, it signals they'll be able to create Flash content too, without being beholden to Adobe.
For now, it's just hacking at the 23C3, but it's a signal to the rest of the market.
Hardware is getting cheaper; and if you don't open up your software, someone else will do it for you. Probably in the middle of the night, for the cost of an Indian takeaway and a good time with friends in Berlin.
Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
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