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).

Tim’s take on a panel:

At an OSCON panel yesterday, there was a really interesting conversation between Danese Cooper and Dain Sundstrom. We were talking about what happens when money arrives at an open source project (either in the form of corporate sponsors or commercialization of the project itself.)

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.

Writes editor Cal Evans:

The tutorials are over and down with, the first officially “Free as in beer” party is over so this conference is officially underway. The weather is much better than Monday. Things really started to pick up steam yesterday with regards to PHP. So here I sit in the first session for everybody. As I sit here and jam to the oldies, watch slide after slide on the many multimedia screens and wait for Nathan Torkington to take the stage, I’ll take the opportunity to give you a fly-over of yesterday’s activities.

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:

• Craig’s List CEO: Academics want our info, co-los hate our volume
• Second Life architect: boundary-crossing users present database, network management issues

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.

Writes Joanna Glasner:

And while representatives of fellow top-ten sites Google and Yahoo didn’t address the purported energy efficiency of open source, the appeal of freely-licensed software to large-scale web operations is emerging as an early theme at this week’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention here.

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:

• The new world domination? Telco?
• Competing against the void: MySQL and PostgreSQL (Greenplum)
• Why Google and Yahoo! can’t be better open source citizens
• OSCON-Bill Hilf: “Microsoft is learning from open source”
• Tim O’Reilly: Opening up 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.

Writes jamie:

I spend a lot of time with my head buried in code, and every time I pick my head up it feels like the future is closer than I thought. So I like coming to OSCON. A week of looking ahead leaves me more confident I won’t get future shock anytime soon. OSCON, like all conferences, is aimed at corporations, the intangible entities that send humans as their proxies. But open source has its roots in individuals working outside the corporation for their community of programmers. Are the two cultures coming together, or colliding?

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.

Another announcement from sponsor MindTouch, this time a partnership with VISI that’s demo-ing here at OSCON:

VISI is exclusive provider of free, feature-rich wiki product

MINNEAPOLIS — July 26, 2006 — Today, VISI, Minnesota’s largest Internet Solutions Provider, launched ViaWiki — a hosted Web creation and collaboration application that allows anyone to create and edit Web pages quickly and easily using a Web browser. VISI partnered with MindTouch, a Minnesota software company, in developing this exclusive, feature-rich version of MindTouch’s wiki software. Access is free, so individuals and businesses can immediately start using the application online at www.viawiki.com without the need to invest in wiki software or their own server.

A press release announcing a team-up with our longtime supporter, CollabNet:

Building on Success with Clients such as Sun and BEA, Companies Formalize Partnership to Enable Agile, Innovative Collaboration on Software Projects

OSCON, Portland, OR, July 26, 2006 - CollabNet, the leading provider of on-demand collaborative software development solutions, and O’Reilly Media, prime source of technology information and community for serious developers, today announced a partnership to market and sell a joint software development solution for distributed developer networks and communities.

O’Reilly’s Denise Kalos and CollabNet’s Andrew Kelly will be co-presenting a session on the solution at OSCON tomorrow.

Tim’s posted additional thoughts about the open source-biology-music mash-up evening hapening Thursday at OSCON:

At the last minute, we’ve added a really cool evening event to OSCON. Molecular biologist Richard Jefferson of Cambia and PatentLens fame, a noted activist for open science, will be talking with me about the importance of patent transparency and distributed innovation in the life sciences.

Dru Lavigne posted a detailed summaries of two tutorials:

Here are my notes from today’s tutorial session: James Howison’s presentation on “Businesses Partnering with Open Source Communities: Opportunities, Perils, and Pitfalls.”

I attended an excellent morning tutorial on copyright, patents, trademarks, and licenses. My notes contain the meat of the session as well as some useful references.

From Dave Rosenberg: “I was late to the panel and since Matt is on it I am trying to cover as much as possible.”

Martin LaMonica expands on MindTouch’s announcement:

A wiki software start-up is releasing two products into open source to help get more developers familiar with its commercial products.

MindTouch, founded by former Microsoft employees, on Tuesday announced the creation of an open-source project around MindTouch Dream, software for building distributed Web applications using Microsoft .Net development tools.

The company also intends to release its wiki-based document-sharing software, called Deki, under an open-source license on Wednesday, said the company’s president and chief technology officer, Steve Bjorg.

The company intends to detail both projects at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention this week.

Steve will be speaking in the Products & Services track here at OSCON.

It’s been a good day for announcements at OSCON. The latest (PDF) is from sponsor (thanks!) MindTouch:

MindTouch Unveils Open Source Web 2.0 API for Microsoft .NET
Web 2.0 applications made easy with MindTouch Dream

O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Booth 911, Portland, OR - July 25, 2006 - MindTouch, a leading provider of on-site Web appliances for the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) market, today announced MindTouch Dream, a powerful open source Web 2.0 platform and software development kit (SDK) built on Microsoft Visual Studio(r) .NET.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier has a good long write-up of his first day:

The eighth annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) kicked off Monday at the Oregon Convention Center. The first two days at OSCON are all about tutorials, with half-day presentations by key contributors to open source projects discussing how to make use of their tools. OSCON has several tracks, including tracks for Web applications, databases, Perl, JavaScript and AJAX, Ruby, Linux, programming, and business.

If you’ll be at OSCON, do visit the Powell’s booth. They’ll be offering a 35% discount on O’Reilly books there, including books published by our partners. They’re also planning author appearances at the booth and hosting an open house at the technical bookstore on Thursday evening, so come on down–details here.

Longtime OSCON supporters ActiveState (thank you!) made this announcement:

ActiveState Previews Komodo 4.0 at O’Reilly Open Source Convention; Award-winning IDE for dynamic languages adds end-to-end web development capabilities

PORTLAND, Ore.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 25, 2006–ActiveState Software Inc., the leading provider of tools and services for dynamic languages, today announced the technical pre-release of Komodo 4.0, introducing advanced support for Web 2.0 technologies to the award-winning IDE for dynamic languages. The release is available for download at: http://www.activestate.com/komodo/.

Matt Asay, co-organizer of the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing and all-around open source go-to guy, writes:

Tim is in the middle of his opening keynote at OSCON, talking about the Big Ideas that are driving open source.

Tim just made an interesting point, one that I first heard r0ml make years ago at eGOVOS: open soure is about efficient free markets, not licenses. Why does open source work (and why does Web 2.0 properly architected, work)? Because it feeds off the self-interest - not generosity - of individual developers. People scratch their own itches, and the overall community of software grows. Just as Adam Smith and free market economists have always said it would.

Another announcement, this one from sponsor (thanks!) WS02:

WSO2 Appoints Inaugural Board of Directors and Advisory Board Group Represents a ‘Who’s Who’ of Technology Leaders and Open Source Pioneers

OSCON, Portland, OR - July 25, 2006 - WSO2, an open source technology company devoted to building Web services middleware, today announced the formation of its board of directors and advisory board. The group is comprised of visionaries and top executives representing some of the most influential companies in the technology and open source community.

Writes Cal Evans:

As conferences go OSCON is pretty good. There is usually something going on, officially or unofficially. Unofficially, or at least quasi-officially, there’s OSCAMP. I stopped by a couple of times today and shot pictures. There never was a room full of people and that was sad because the sessions were interesting. Here is a picture of Brandon Sanders. (middle) He is the facilitator of OSCAMP this year and provided the cool shirts. (Everybody say THANK YOU Brandon).

OSCON sponsor Covalent (thank you!) just made an announcement:

Leading Supplier of Complete Enterprise Open Source Solutions also Announces Support for Apache Axis2 Web Services Framework

Covalent Technologies, the most trusted source for complete enterprise open source solutions, today announced it will begin distributing the WSO2 Tungsten SOA Application Server to enterprise customers, furthering its strategic partnership with WSO2, a technology company that builds open source Web services middleware platforms. Tungsten is a fully integrated Web services server based around Apache Axis2. Covalent is also partnering with WSO2 to provide full commercial support for the Apache Axis2 project.

Fearless OSCON leader Nat Torkington writes, “It’s tutorial day here at OSCON, but some of us have been hard at it for days…I love the hallway track!”

Jon Perr writes:

OSCON is not just the premier North American conference for open source software developers. As I first reported a year ago, OSCON is increasingly a showcase for Oregon’s burgeoning open technology industry.

Laura Thompson writes, “I’m here at OSCON in sunny, sunny, Portland, and I was just discussing with Nat Torkington my long standing concept of the T-Shirt Index as internet economic indicator. He pointed out that I should blog about it, so here it is.”

Laura’s also posted a PHP Lightning Talks plug.

A release hot off the BusinessWire:

Compiere, Inc., the premier provider of open source business applications, announced that founder and CEO Jorg Janke will present a session entitled “Building Successful Commercial Open Source Projects” at The Eighth Annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) being held July 24-28, 2006 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.

Janke’s session will take place Thursday, July 27 at 11:35 a.m. in room D135 of the Oregon Convention Center. He will share with the audience how he built a leading open source project and then transformed it into a commercial success.

Calling all VoIP hackers, phone phreakers, and telephony aficionados everywhere–the Call for Participation for our second Emerging Telephony Conference is now open.

Program co-chairs Surj Patel and Brady Forrest are seeking proposals centered around the innovations and projects occurring in open source telephony, wireless mobility, mobile telephony, wi-fi VoIP, telephone networks as platforms, and the intersection of VoIP telephony with web services. We’re planning another evening ETel Fair too, so if you’ve been working on a way-under-the-radar gadget or app, we’d like to hear from you.

Tell a friend! And even if you don’t want to present, tell us who and/or what would make ETel 2007 a must-attend event for you. Send your suggestions to etelchair@oreilly.com.

In today’s business section, Mike Rogoway penned a timely overview of OSCON:

More than 2,000 open source developers from around the world will gather in Portland for OSCON — the annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention — which starts today and runs through Friday at the OCC.

“This is sort of the alumni party for open source,” said Nathan Torkington, who is jointly chairing the conference’s program lineup. Diverse programming communities come together, Torkington said, to share war stories and pool hard-won knowledge.

It’s official–we’re co-hosting next year’s RailsConf with our friends over at Ruby Central. RailsConf 2007 happens at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, May 17-20. Other dates of note: Call for Participation opens in October 2006 and general registration opens in early 2007. Sign up for the RailsConf newsletter if you’d like to receive updates.

From the press release:

Virtuas, Terracotta, and Others to Host Geronimo Live! at OSCON 2006

Terracotta has teamed up with Virtuas Open Source Solutions, LLC to further extend consulting, training, and support services for Geronimo and other open source technologies. Together, they and others will host Apache Geronimo Live! on July 27, 2006 at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), in Portland, Oregon, where attendees can learn more about the Apache Geronimo Project and the organizations that support and utilize the application server.

Allison Randal, co-chair of OSCON this year, writes on the Radar:

At OSCON this year we decided to shake things up a bit. In addition to the usual sessions and events, we’ve also added OSCamp. It’s a bit like a conference within a conference, running all week long right there in the convention center. It’s completely free for anyone to attend and completely open for anyone to speak. The schedule isn’t planned in advance and anyone can walk in, write their name on the board, and hold a talk or group discussion, whether they’re attending the conference, live in the area, or just travelled in to enjoy the “hallway track” and brush shoulders with the Open Source rock stars.

I’ve wanted to do something like OSCamp at OSCON for years now, so I’m excited to see it come together.

James Duncan Davidson

Duncan, our super-photolicious official conference photographer, has planned a few unofficial events to enhance the socializing opportunities during our open source confab.

The OSCON events keep piling on. In addition to evening BoFs, a Firefox Flicks movie screening, opening night talks with the ever-entertaining Larry Wall and Damian Conway, an open house at Powell’s Tech Books, the presentation of the Google-O’Reilly Open Source Awards, Werewolf game, and a Portland bridges tour, two new ones are:

• CAMBIA BiOS Initiative Concert and Keynote–Molecular biologist Richard Jefferson and Tim O’Reilly discuss “Common Cause for Open Innovation: Biological Open Source (BiOS), Patent Transparency and Human Rights.” Following the presentation, renowned mandolin player Mike Marshall and Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto will perform.
• HP Third Annual OSCON Photo Contest–Last year, over 100 people participated and over 650 photos were judged. HP is again offering cool prizes for this year’s winners, so polish your lens, read the rules, and start snapping.

Fearless Leader Tim O’Reilly has also posted thoughts on the upcoming Executive Briefing happening at OSCON next week:

I’m focusing the program around the intersection of Open Source and Web 2.0, because I continue to believe that even though Web 2.0 is deeply rooted in open source, it’s the open source community that most needs to be reminded of the connection. The world that gave birth to the free and open source software communities has changed radically, and open source needs to change as a result.

Tim O’Reilly and Matt Asay have been hard at work putting the final touches on the program for the very first Executive Briefing, which will take place during OSCCON (Tuesday, July 25 to be exact). They’ve added some interesting new speakers and tweaked the program to be more conversational and interactive. Two other phrases they throw around a lot in the session descriptions? “Spotlight” and “hot seat.” Heh heh.

Matt’s posted additional thoughts about the Executive Briefing on his InfoWorld blog.

Nat Torkington talks about what you can expect at this year’s show with Daniel Steinberg. He explains that each technology has a great set of talks, but the strength of OSCON is that so many different topics are covered in one conference. It allows you to stretch and learn things from, and share ideas with, people solving similar problems using different tools.

Master podcaster Daniel Steinberg has just posted another show from Where 2.0:

We’re featuring three sessions from the second day of the Where 2.0 conference. Chris Spurgeon presents the best geo hacks of the last 2000 years, Gary Lang looks at the possibilities that arise from APIs and open source code, and Tim O’Reilly moderates a panel on the future of the data industry.

Matt Asay, co-organizer of the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing (debuting in two short weeks at OSCON) has sparked a bit of debate lately about the “where” of open source.

Matthew Aslett in Computer Business Review created a map mash-up, which was slashdotted. The /. post brings together the discussion threads from Matt Asay, Robert Scoble, and Dana Blankenhorn. How do Europe, Silicon Valley, the personal lives of open source executives influence location?

A year ago, Computerworld’s Mark Hall remarked on OSCON’s growing exhibit hall, observing that OSCON might be a replacement for Comdex one day. That day is still a way off. But–I’m happy to report that we will have more booths this year and we’re doing our best to increase the value while expanding the real estate:

• Twenty vendor presentations happening on the show floor
• Two days of Product & Services presentations in parallel with convention sessions
• Lots of great DotOrgs and volunteer projects to get acquainted with
• Job recruiting
• Face time with thousands of other open source fans

Exhibit hall passes are free, so sign up if you want to drop by! That free pass *also* gets you into the exhibit hall reception Wednesday night, birds of a feather sessionsand community meetings, and OSCamp, a very cool spontaneous “un-conference” debuting at OSCON this year.