Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier recapped his continuing experiences at OSCON:
Day Three: “The problem with OSCON is selecting the talks that you want to go to, making time for all of the activities, and getting anything like a decent amount of sleep. The schedule starts at about 8:30 every morning, with sessions until past 6:00 p.m. and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and parties well into the late hours of the evening.”
Day Four: “OSCON continued Thursday with updates on Perl 6 and Python, discussion of the Zen of Free, and the final day of exhibits.”
Each year the Python community honors one of its own with the Frank Willison Award, named for revered O’Reilly editor Frank Willison. This year, the laurels go to Alex Martelli. Congrats!
Webtide is a new services company that provides training, development and support services for Web 2.0 applications. Webtide was formally launched last week during OSCON. Read more.
Daniel Steinberg’s posted a podcast interview with OSCamp organizer Brandon Sanders:
One of the great things about conferences like OSCON is that you get to catch up with people working on projects you are interested in. You find these people at sessions and in the hallways and at this year’s OSCON you can find them by announcing a session at OSCamp.
Steve Bryant covered the announcement:
As expected, Google announced a new service for open-source developers July 27. The service, called Project Hosting, allows developers to upload their own open-source projects and search for others. Greg Stein, an engineering manager at Google and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, disclosed the service at OSCON (the O’Reilly Open Source Community Convention).
That’s the question Eric Lai discusses in his article:
When Bob Hecht joined Informa as its vice president of content strategy, he dreamed of rebuilding the British technical publisher’s infrastructure using Linux and open-source technologies. But with Microsoft Windows entrenched throughout the company, Hecht settled on a more pragmatic hybrid: an open-source content management server from Alfresco Software, backed up by open-source applications MySQL, Apache Tomcat and JBoss — all running on Windows Server-based hardware.
“Would I want to put it all on Linux? Yeah, that’s the geek in me,” Hecht said at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention last week. “But the Alfresco application doesn’t necessarily run better under Linux.”
Niall, a “feed syndication geek” wrapped up Rasmus’ OSCON presentation last week:
Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O’Reilly’s Open Source conference today. Most programmers use default installations and configurations for their web applications and never really dig deep within their stack or their own code to optimize page load and latency.
Today OSCON wrapped up with one last set of keynote speeches and a couple more sessions. As I’m sitting at the airport in Portland I’m reflecting on this years conference and trying to compare and contrast it to previous years. Once again the conference was loaded with informative sessions lead be the alpha geeks of the open source community. And as it happens every year, a new set of memes appears on the horizon that is bound to shape next year’s OSCON.
Tim O’Reilly writes in Open Communities vs. Open Source that the existence of an open source project does not necessarily imply an open community. MySQL, JBoss, and Mozilla have wrestled with this. Sun is, right now, as it talks about opening the Java source code.
The last session of Thursday for me here at OSCON were the “The Art of Community” lightning talks where every speaker gets only 5 minutes to give their talk. Projected behind the speaker is a giant clock that shows how much time the speaker has left and the audience makes a nasty buzzing sound when time is up. Enforced with little mercy, this format allowed 8 speakers give their nutshell experiences with open source communities in 45 minutes.
Joanna Glasner has written an overview of the program:
When Narayan Newton, an Oregon State computer science student, received an e-mail from a prominent developer of Linux desktop applications, he expected it to be a complaint. “I’d submitted some bug reports,” he says. Instead, Newton was surprised to learn that the programmer, Duncan Mac-Vicar, would be his personal mentor for three months, courtesy of Google’s “Summer of Code” program.
The program, now in its second summer, pays 630 students to stay home and code over the summer, working under mentors that include more than a few rock stars of the open-source world. “A lot of times in computer science school you’re exposed to important problems, but you’re not exposed to what’s on the other side of the keyboard,” said Chris DiBona, Google’s open-source program manager, discussing the program at this week’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention here.
Audio sensei Daniel Steinberg gave me my first lesson in “person on the street” interviewing techniques yesterday while we were on the OSCON show floor. So much to learn! But I’m happy to note that we captured a few great comments and memories from several of our attendees and exhibitors.
Speaker wrangler extraordinaire Vee McMillan reports that presentation files are starting to go up. She’ll be adding more over the next few days, so check back for more.
Simon Phipps has also posted notes from his keynote.
So, is it embarrassing that this PR Gal missed congratulating one of the award winners from Tuesday night’s Opening Night, Stefan Taxhet, Best Corporate Liaison, OpenOffice.org? You bet. Oy. Apologies, Stefan, and thanks, Simon, for bringing it to my attention!
Cal Evans just filed this post:
Wow, how times files when you are having fun. After I finished yesterday’s wrap-up, I sat through most of the opening session that included Tim O’Reilly’s Radar. It was an interesting parade of up and comers who Tim thought we should know about.
This morning I sat in on two open source and business oriented talks — first was “What happens when the money comes?“, a panel discussion with heavy weights Danese Cooper and Tim O’Reilly, among others. The panel discussed what happens to open source projects when existing corporations come in and acquire successful open source projects. The recent acquisition of JBoss by RedHat fueled the creation of this panel discussion.
From Zonk’s /. post:
NewsForge (also owned by OSTG) has word of Google’s newest product: an open-source project repository. Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier sat down for a talk with Greg Stein and Chris DiBona, who say that the product is very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them.
Read the NewsForge article for more details.
Peter Galli published three articles in eWeek yesterday:
XenSource, VMware Conflict Holds Back Linux Virtualization
Don’t expect to see a single virtualization technology baked into the Linux kernel in the near future. That’s because XenSource and VMware are butting heads instead of working together to come up with a joint solution, Greg Kroah-Hartman told attendees on July 26 here at the annual OSCON (O’Reilly Open Source Conference).
Scalix to Contribute Software to Open-Source Community
Scalix has taken the open-source plunge and will contribute parts of the source code for its messaging infrastructure platform to the community. At the annual OSCON (O’Reilly Open Source Conference) here on July 26, Scalix also announced that it will turn its popular Community Edition software into an open-source project. That software is currently available for free to users, but is not open.
Google at OSCON: Open Source Promotes Competition
Google believes that open source is one of the strongest ways to preserve industry competition, and its goal is to help this industry remain healthy and keep injecting fresh blood into it, said Chris DiBona, Google’s open source program manager, in a presentation at the annual O’Reilly Open Source Conference here July 26. “The world is more interesting with open-source software, and Google derives a lot of benefit from this, which is why we believe it is so important to support it and ensure its continued good health,” he said.
Adam Doxtater has a quick take on the announcement:
Google’s Greg Stein just announced a new serviced aimed squarely at Open Source projects titled Google Code. The new service will compete with servies such as SourceForge in hosting Open Source projects at no cost. The difference, according to Stein, lie in the fact that they have streamlined the Subversion system to include only the fields a typical OSS project might require, trimming out the bulk not used by most developers.
Our master podcaster Daniel Steinberg has posted audio from the Opening Night event:
OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, began with the traditional night of fun - this year featuring Larry Wall’s State of the Onion, Kathy Sierra on Creating Passionate Users, and Damian Conway’s geek interpretation of the Da Vinci Code.
Most excellent Perl dude brian d foy wrote up the ceremony results:
At the 2006 O’Reilly Open Source Convention, also known as the Tenth Perl Conference, Dave Adler (2001 White Camel recipient for his work with the first ever Perl users group, the New York Perl Mongers) and Sarah Burcham (oranizer of the 2002 Yet Another Perl Conference in St. Louis) presented three awards.
Josh McAdams, the host of Perlcast and the organizer of the 2006 Yet Another Perl Conference in Chicago.
Jay Hannah, keeps Perl Mongers user groups running. Perl Mongers started by providing free web hosting, domain names, mailing lists, and other central services to make it as easy as possible for new user groups to start and to attract Perl hackers in their area.
Randal L. Schwartz has been involved with Perl since its early days, and…Randal has been a tireless advocate of Perl and the community of Perl, and his philosophy of giving back to the community is the epitome of the White Camel.
O’Reilly Systems Administrator Ryan Bates attended Jacob Kaplan-Moss’
session on Django: Web Development with Journalists’ Deadlines.
Jacob covered the philosophy of the development of Django, a framework
that lets you build high performance web apps quickly, with much less
code, and adhering to best practices.
The core philosophy of the project was “web development ridiculously
fast.” Jacob said, “If we had to wait for code to compile, we wouldn’t be
able to do our job.” Jacob also said, “open sourcing Django succeeded
beyond our wildest dreams.”
We’re looking for a solution for the O’Reilly Intranet and will be taking
a closer look at Django.
Another good summary from Joe Brockmeier:
The eighth annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) continued yesterday with more tutorials, the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing, the Open Source Awards, and Larry Wall’s State of the Onion report.
Russell Shaw has posted two more entries from his time at the Executive Briefing:
Yet Another Slashdot Post:
The new wiki start-up founded by former Microsoft employees, MindTouch, has just announced two new open source offerings to help bolster their user base. MindTouch Dream, a development framework and Deki, a wiki-based document sharing program that was built using Dream will both be debuted at this year’s OSCON, currently underway.
Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick’s excellent “How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)” presentation closed out my first day here at OSCON. Ben and Brian poured out their collective learning on how to manage poisonous people in open source projects. Their experiences with the Subversion community gave them tons of insights on how to spot poisonous people, how to protect against them and what to do if your project gets infected by these people.
Matt Asay, O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing co-organizer extraordinaire, and his InfoWorld co-columnist Dave Rosenberg have published a raft of observations about OSCON:
Ryan Bates, a system administrator at O’Reilly, attended Michael Buffington’s session on Using Ruby on Rails and Ajax to Make a Massive Multiplayer Game:
Michael gave a humorous look on how he used open source software to create
llor.nu, a fun and addicting open source game which has had huge growth
since going open source. Currently there are more than 10,000 registered
users. He used Pixen, an open source graphics editor, to create the
isometric pixel art for the buildings. Michael said it was amazing on how
fast he got it up and running on Ruby on Rails and that he hasn’t
encountered any significant problems scaling to the large number of users.
Back in the post-bubble days of Internet commerce, I worked for a small Portland-based consulting shop that had to take care of messy details such as credit cards and billing for customers. The costs for a small company are huge, but large companies can negotiate tremendously good deals — that’s why Paypal and other non-credit-card billing systems exist.
That’s just one example of infrastructure that software by itself doesn’t address — does having or using open source software matter when you can’t afford the hardware or services necessary to deploy your code? This thread came up in the keynotes and Q&A session at OSCON this morning. Tim O’Reilly has more
thoughts on open infrastructure on the Radar.
I’m pleased to have made it to another OSCON here in Portland. This year has
been pretty hectic for me and for a long time it looked like I wasn’t going to
be able to make it, but in the end things fell into place after all. Its good to
here — the conference is once again packed with many great presentations. Even the
BOFs are going to make it hard to ignore all the free beer at the many parties
that are planned today and tomorrow. Ah, life is rough at the O’Reilly
conferences.
After the morning keynotes I dropped into Chris DiBona’s presentation on Google’s
Summer of code program. Chris presented the background of the program and then
showed a number of slides that outlined what projects students are hacking on during
their Summer of Code.
Sponsor Alfresco (thanks!) made an announcement today:
LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 26, 2006–Alfresco Software Inc., the first provider of an open source enterprise content management solution, today announced full Open Document Format (ODF) support through its ODF Virtual File System. ODF is an open, XML-based file standard suitable for office applications and designed for managing features in text, spreadsheet, charts and graphical documents.
Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady articulates an advantage to actually attending a conference in person that we try to get across in our marketing materials, but of course is always better expressed by the participants:
It’s the people, stupid. Yes, as Stephe Walli and I discussed this morning, the sessions were outstanding - short on philosophical meandering, long on credible, usable insights and data. But ultimately, the value of this conference resides - as it always has - in the people. I do wish that the people were given more of an opportunity to contribute to the conference itself, Mashup Camp style, but that sorts itself out as the hallways become the unconference to OSCON’s official tracks.
GeekyGirl Dawn Foster writes:
Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first half of the executive briefing; however, the portion that I attended was immensely valuable. Favorite Quotes*:
- Michael Tiemann (Red Hat): “You can look at cost all day, but it is really about value.”
- Matt Asay (Alfresco): “Tim is being too nice, I’m going to be Danese.”
Sponsor (thanks!) Six Apart has a lot to announce:
Six Apart Introduces New Jabber Server to the Open Source Community and IM and Voice to LiveJournal Users; LiveJournal Partners with Gizmo Project To Offer Integrated IM and Voice Calling Worldwide
O’Reilly Open Source Convention
SAN FRANCISCO & PORTLAND, Ore.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 26, 2006–Six Apart, the world leader in blogging software and services, today announced it has created an open source modular, scalable, high performance Jabber server that enables others to integrate their services with Jabber and LJ Talk, LiveJournal’s new instant messaging and voice service. The new server provides smoothly integrated IM and voice capabilities, and is now available for any company or service provider to use for free.
Dru Lavigne took notes at Doc Searls’ afternoon tutorial:
Doc’s talk was very well attended. He is very good at anecdotal one-liners, many of which I’ve transcribed here.
Doc started the talk by revisiting Cluetrain–which is well worth reading for the first time or rereading if it has been a while. Cluetrain started as a rant and turned into a website which turned into a bestselling book. Six years later, it’s still in Amazon’s top 1%.
Ta-da! Congrats, guys, and thanks for all of your hard work on behalf of the FOSS community!
- Cliff Schmidt, Best Legal Eagle, Apache
- Gervase Markham, Best Community Activist, Firefox
- Julian Seward, Best Toolmaker, Valgrind
- Stefan Taxhet, Best Corporate Liaison, OpenOffice.org
- Peter Lundblad, Best All-around Developer, Subversion
OSCON exhibitor Scalix (thank you!) made an announcement this morning:
Software Vendor Announces Open Source Strategy and Roadmap
San Mateo, CA and O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Portland, OR–July 26, 2006–Scalix Corporation, the leading Linux email, calendaring and integration platform company, today announced that it will turn its popular Scalix Community Edition free software product into an open source project.
Russell Shaw attended the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing yesterday and had this to write:
While Microsoft has been increasingly tip-toeing into open source via SourceForge projects, Shared Source licenses and Linuxlab, getting to this place where Open Source is no longer considered a pejorative by Microsoft has been a slow and deliberate process that must be massaged both internally and externally.
At Microsoft, that massaging is an unwritten part of Bill Hilf’s job description. Hilf, who is general manager of platform strategy for the company that so many open sourcers can’t even utter without a snicker, described these challenges during a presentation yesterday at the OSCON Open Source Convention in Portland.
