Matt Asay covers and comments on the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards.

Serdar Yegulalp talks with Jim Hemlin about the potential he sees in the cloud.

Paul Krill writes about Sun’s announcements at OSCON.

Today at OSCON, David Recordon announced the Open Web Foundation, an organization that will help the creation and acceptance of Open Web.

The news was immediately picked up by:
Washington Post.com
TechCrunch.com
TechMeme
ReadWriteWeb
CNet.com

At the OSCON show, Black Duck and Intel are offering better ways for open-source developers to accelerate software development and improve their parallel processing capabilities.

Darryl Taft reports on more OSCON news.

“Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren’t the only businesses that don’t like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs.

It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community. When stolen proprietary software is used by consumers, that’s a lost opportunity for open-source software makers to get their own software onto the computer hard drives of new users,” writes Todd R. Weiss in his report on Louis Suarez-Potts’ OSCON presentation.

Open source is changing the rules about how software is designed, created and distributed. But leadership isn’t always nearly as innovative. Esther Schindler spoke with Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth and two of the dudes who run SourceForge, and discussed some of the lessons the open source community could bear to learn.

Whether you call it a cellphone, a “Palmtop”, smartphone, or a converged device — pocket-sized computing devices took center stage at the first-ever O’Reilly Open Mobile Exchange held this week at Oscon 2008, in Portland, Oregon.

With more than 3 billion cellular users world-wide, “open” handheld devices promise to smash the stranglehold of proprietary systems — even invade the domain of desktop computers. In 2008 more users will access the internet via a mobile phone than PCs or laptops. The excitement and creativity was palpable. Open source mobile platforms have been introduced by The Limo Foundation, The Open Handset Alliance, Symbian and Open Moko. Topic of the day: global domination.
Sam Churchill’s story continues here.

Matt Asay speculates on the predominance of Apple computers in the OSCON crowd.

Michael Halligan reports on his friends’ session, “How to Run a User Group” and details the series of steps he learned from the panel.

“Speaking at the Open Mobile Exchange portion of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), Jim Zemlin, executive director of the foundation, touted the trends and technologies pushing Linux into a leadership position in mobile systems. He was followed by Jason Grigsby, web strategist at mobile and web design firm Cloud Four, who emphasised the coming influence of the mobile web but countered that developers are not yet ready for it.” Read more of Paul Krill’s article.

We loved reading Serdar Yegulalp’s opinion on OSCON, especially since he started by saying, “O’Reilly knows how to treat their guests. Not only was the registration process wonderfully painless (+1 points), not only was there wireless throughout the convention center (+3 points), the tables in the lecture halls had power strips (+5). My notebook gets around 4-5 hours of battery life, but not having to run out of juice in the middle of a lecture is a huge help. (The giant Buddhist temple bell outside the convention center that rings “without warning” was another nice bonus.)”

Darryl Taft reports on Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, “Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, calls on Linux developers to make the presentation layer of desktop Linux applications even more attractive to users than Apple’s Mac OS.”

I have attended the O’Reilly Open Mobile Exchange (OMX), which is a one-day event organized for the first time as part of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON2008). I came to OSCON primarily for OMX and I am glad I did — it was a wonderful event full of useful information — many thanks to the organizers and speakers. Here are some highlights with comments…

Its good to be back in Portland for my favorite geek convention: O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference. The overcast sky in Portland is making it a little easier this year to focus on the plethora of excellent speakers and sessions. The first session to really grip and and speak to me was Rabble and Kellan’s “Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub” presentation.