Jay Lymon covers OSCON:

This year’s O’Reilly OSCON event in Portland, Oregon had the usual open source conference hallmarks - long, gray Unix beards, Linux-based long hairs, packs of PHP, Perl, Ruby and other programmers, laid-back geek attire consisting of shorts and sandles, open source executives in jackets (ties are not welcome), and free as in ‘free beer’ beer on the exhibit floor.

More OSCON coverage:

OSCON 2007 was a huge success for the PostgreSQL community.

Interesting article from Switzerland:

Two important facts, relayed in today’s press, show the increasing importance of the Open Source Community on the Internet.

Mark Hall covers Ubuntu Live:

Ubuntu is revered among Linux devotees as a desktop operating system.

DHH blogs about the last week of earlybird registration:

Last week of early-bird price for RailsConf Europe

Another article from reporter Elise Ackerman from OSCON:

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the world’s biggest community-written online encyclopedia, announced Friday that he had taken a small step toward his next big goal: a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google.

Got to love this headline:

Symas Corporation proclaims O’Reilly’s OSCon 2007 A Success!

Great “slice of life” take on OSCON:

OSCON is my favorite conference these days. I love it because it brings so many diverse people under a single umbrella for a week.

This is a fun take on the hectic schedule of life at a conference:

I’m back from OSCON, but still feeling the impact of what was another great event. It’s not just the great parties that leave you drained, it’s also the massive amount of learning, discussion and information.

This is a good article on happenings at OSCON:

The echoes from the last OSCON parties haven’t even stopped reverberating though the halls as the next convention moves in.

More award coverage from OSCON:

SourceForge, Inc. the leader in community-driven media and e-commerce, announced the winners of its second annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards in Portland, OR, at an evening celebration held during the OSCON conference.

Here is one of the exhibitor’s take on OSCON:

Just finished up my 2007 ‘OSCON Experience’ I attended the conference on Tuesday and Wednesday and we had our PDXPHP both in the exhibit hall as last year, but in addition I helped to organize the OSCamp room.

Another nice TOC mention:

For many avid readers, the experience of using an electronic reader of any kind, whether it be desktop computer, laptop, or specialized e-reader, has been disappointing.

A nice mention of the TOC 2007 conference:

The publishing industry, like the music industry, films and news media, is facing a technological revolution that has made some of the its functions obsolete, altered the way others are performed, and generated new opportunities to serve the public and make money.

This piece was published in New Delhi, India:

The developers behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution has said that they would be coming out with the next long term support (LTS) edition of the popular Linux distribution in April 2008.

This article covers Canonical’s LTS release:

Ubuntu will release its next long term support (LTS) edition of the popular Linux distribution in April 2008. This is according to Mark Shuttleworth who was speaking at the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Oregon yesterday.

My last session of OSCON yesterday was Danese Cooper’s “The Art of Community” panel talk with Karl Fogel, Jimmy Wales, Dawn Foster, Sulamita Garcia, Whurley, and Brian Behlendorf. This year Danese asked community oriented questions and let the various panel members jump in to answer the questions. Blogging panel presentations can be tricky since the exchanges between the panel members and even the audience fly back and for quite fast. I tried to capture the best questions and the best responses, but I’m not even going to claim that my coverage is anywhere near complete.

It’s always nice to have the local media attend one of our conferences, here’s an article that resulted
from Mike Rogoway’s visit to OSCON:

With Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in Portland to speak at OSCON on Friday

This is a really nice article from Michael Calore on Linux in schools:

It’s common knowledge that getting kids excited about computers and technology is the best way to get them excited about learning.

Another comprehensive blog from Matt:

I was fortunate to keynote this year’s Ubuntu Live conference.

More coverage for Microsoft’s news:

In Bill Hilf’s keynote at Oscon today, he announced that Microsoft will submit it’s shared source licenses to the OSI for approval.

Computerworld at Ubuntu covers the roll outs expected from Canonical over the next year:

It plans to bolster server software, offer regular ‘enterprise releases’

More Ubuntu Live coverage:

The first ever Ubuntu Live conference, running concurrently with the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland

Computerworld covers Ubuntu, specifically Canonical’s roll out plans for the year:

The Ubuntu distribution of Linux is widely appreciated by open-source supporters for its emphasis on integrating many elements of free software that appeal to desktop users. However, in the coming months, Canonical Ltd., the London-based commercial backer of Ubuntu, plans to focus on its server software for many of its system improvements.

Coverage of Ubuntu news:

From the Innnnno-va-tion time, C’Mon! dept.: Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced on July 22 at the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Ore., the availability of Landscape, its Web-based systems management program for Ubuntu servers and desktops.

Always happy to Darryl Taft at an O’Reilly conference, here’s what he had to say about Microsft at OSCON:

Microsoft has recommitted to working with the open-source community, even submitting its Shared Source License to the Open Source Initiative for approval as an approved license for sharing code.

Another fine article on OSCON news from Matt Asay:

Tim notes that Microsoft will be submitting its shared-source licenses to the OSI for approval. He calls this “huge, long-awaited,…and earthshaking.” It’s actually none of the above, but it is welcome.

News from sponsor/exhibitor Kysoh:

O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Portland, OR, JULY 25, 2007 - OSCON seems to be impossible to circumvent for the young company Kysoh. After having revealed Tux Droid, the smart companion for Geeks at OSCON 2006, Kysoh is proud to return this year to present Tux Droid Gadget Manager. Commercialized in March 2007, Tux Droid quickly became very popular in Europe. He made the cover of magazines in France, Germany and Italy. Tux is now really alive!

Microsoft comments on open source with at OSCON:

I have some thoughts regarding the future of open source and how an organization matures along with the movement it helped to create.

Microsoft had some news while at OSCON:

Today, Microsoft took another step in its relationship with the open source software community. We did this by bringing up a new web property that clearly outlines Microsoft’s position on OSS by providing specific information about Microsoft, the OSS community and the interaction between the two.

More news, this time from exhibitor SpikeSource:

SpikeSource, a provider of business-ready open source applications, today announced plans to work together with Microsoft Corp. to certify all of SpikeSource’s SpikeIgnited solutions on the Microsoft Windows platform.

After today’s excellent OSCON keynote speeches I attended Adam Keys “People Hacks” presentation. Adam started with the disclaimer that the goal of this talk was not to manipulate people, but rather how you can change your behavior to foster improved communication when working with groups of people. Adam suggests using People Hacks for advocacy and for gel’ling teams to work more effectively.

A podcast from an interview from OSCON with Ross Turk:

O’Reilly’s Source Convention (OSCON) 2007 is happing this week in Portland, Oregon. The conference is in it’s first day of sessions, but has really been going on for about five days because of tutorials and the Ubuntu Live conference.

Week has begin to file stories on OSCON 2007. Here is the first of many:

Intel is open-sourcing its Threading Building Blocks 2.0 software, a C++ template library that simplifies the development of software applications running in parallel.

Multi conference sponsors ActiveState had the following news from OSCON today:

Portland’s Second Story develops online database for the National Postal Museum using ActiveState’s Komodo IDE

Big news from industry giant Intel had news here at OSCON:

Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB), a popular software C++ template library that simplifies the development of software applications

Yesterday at OSCON I attended Mitchell Baker’s “Mozilla Firefox and the Internet as an Open Platform” presentation in which she talked about Mozilla’s mission to ensure that the Internet stays open and healthy. She outlined the two ends of the spectrum of what the Internet could turn into in the next few years. On one end you have the Nirvana vision:

More news, this time from sponsor Ingres:

Ingres Joins the Eclipse Foundation

This is a very insightful article covering the Executive Briefing:

This is the second year that Oscon has included a one day conference-within-a-conference called O’Reilly Radar, intended as an executive level briefing session on new open source or related technologies. The agenda includes a wide range of topics reflecting the broad interests of Tim O’Reilly and his gang of folks who blog at O’Reilly Radar.

Here is a link to the pod cast of an interview between

One of those people that I’ve talked with is Ross Turk, the Community Relationship Manager at SourceForge.net.

Michael Calore offers his take on Mozilla:

The morning’s executive briefing sessions are underway here at OSCON. Tim O’Reilly just led a discussion on stage about Firefox add-ons — what they’ve achieved, how the open source model has shaped their development and what they contribute to the web.

More news, this time from exhibitor Silicon Mechanics:

BOTHELL, WA - July 25, 2007 - Silicon Mechanics, Inc., a leading provider of rackmount servers, storage, and high-performance computing solutions, today announced the release of its Bladeform 8100 Series Blade Server Platform.

Today, the main sessions of OSCON kicked off and after the keynotes I attended Josh Berkus’ talk entitled “Performance Whack-a-mole“. Since MusicBrainz relies on Postgres for its database back-end and I’ve had to deal with database performance issues, I’m keenly interested to learn the tricks of the trade. And since Josh is one of the key guys behind Postgres, this talk was getting the tips straight from the horse’s mouth.

If you’re wanting to follow up to see who won the awards, here is where you’ll need to look:

Last night, July 24, at the Open Source Conference in Portland the winners of the coveted Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award were announced.