July 2007 Archives

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.

Building and deploying enterprise-level web-based applications now a reality for SMEs.

Portland, OR July 23, 2007 - Software developer, once:technologies, has released the world’s first browser-based Web 2.0 application development environment to the open source community. The company’s CEO, Mr Rob Napier, unveiled once:radix at OSCON 2007 Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon.

More news from OSCON, this time from sponsor Jive Software:

Jive Launches Community with Nationwide Open Source Plugin Contest
PORTLAND, Ore., July 25, 2007 - Today at OSCON, Jive Software announced the launch of its new developer community, Jivespace, an online community where developers can share knowledge and develop extensions for Jive’s collaboration solutions, including Clearspace, Clearspace X and Jive Forums. Jivespace is available online at dev.jivesoftware.com.

Elise has been making the rounds at OSCON and this is the first of her stories regarding show news:

Intel launched its first open-source software project today, a tool that makes it much easier to program multi-core chips working together.

Here’s a podcast of a nice interview with Mark Shuttleworth, Jono Bacon and Gerry Carr, all of Canonical:

I attended the Ubuntu Live conference in the beautiful city of Portland Oregon and had the good fortune of interviewing Jono Bacon the “Community Manager” for Ubuntu, Gerry Carr, the Marketing Manager for Canonical, and none other than Mark Shuttleworth.

This article discusses a presentation made by Marten Mickos at Ubuntu:

MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos recently told the Ubuntu Live Conference in Portland, Oregon that despite the efforts of big companies like Microsoft to discourage the use of open source software, the ‘open source movement is so strong that nothing can stop it any more’, reports PC World magazine.

This is an article covering Canonical’s news at Ubuntu:

During the Ubuntu Live Conference in Portland, Ore., Canonical announced the beta release of its Launchpad PPA (Personal Package Archive) service, a new way for developers to build and publish packages of their code, documentation, artwork, themes and other contributions to free software.

Interesting article on Red Hat:

OSCON Sometimes being the open source software leader means distancing yourself from open source claims.

In the afternoon at the Executive Briefing Tim O’Reilly spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu/Canonical, in the “Why Free Software Values Work for Business” session. Like many conversations, this conversation veered off the main topic pretty quickly and started focusing on collaboration in the open source space.

Mark observed that open source’s key strength against legacy companies is the ability to collaborate. Many people from all over the globe, many of whom have never met, work together to create complex software releases like Ubuntu. These people work to release software at regular intervals and with much greater frequency than either Microsoft or Apple. The ability to collaborate in a distributed fashion and produce quality results gives open source a significant advantage in the market.

Today I’m covering the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing where Eben Moglen and Tim O’Reilly just finished their “Licensing in the Web 2.0 Era” interview. Unfortunately the interview veered off topic quickly when Eben started berating Tim O’Reilly for wasting 10 years with “Open Source”. Eben believes that everyone should be thinking in terms of “Free Software” and not “Open Source”, but we already knew that.

Nice Ubuntu Live coverage from Ryan Paul:

The Ubuntu community has assembled in Portland, Oregon for the very first Ubuntu Live conference.

Matt has been covering open source technology for some time, this article is an interesting perspective
on the growth in the market:

Tim O’Reilly is giving a keynote speech at the Ubuntu Live conference, even as I type. I spoke just before him, and he’s now throwing out much of what I said. :-) (I argued that we need to be more religious about open source, not less, by which I meant “filled with passion,” not “filled with fury toward unbelievers,” which is not a religion that I’ve seen much of here.)

Harlem is having a good time at the show, he’s what he said about day two:

Well, my “technical executive” made it to the Ubuntu Live conference and we are currently just settling in before the speakers start.

The definition, according to the Miami Herald:

The definition of Web 2.0 differs depending on whom you ask.

This was an interesting presentation, Todd Weiss reports:

Marten Mickos knows the role open source software can play in business and personal computing.

Mark Hall writes about the true work ethic that drives Open Source:

Sunday is no longer a day of rest for the open-source crowd — at least not for those true believers in the Ubuntu distribution of Linux and other open-source tools.

Intel invited me to attend their super seekrit media event (read: booze &amp food) this evening. They didn’t tell us anything about the topic of the event, so I decided to go check it out and see what sorts of food/drinks Intel had to offer. I wasn’t thinking that their event would really get my attention and have me writing another blog entry this evening. But, I was wrong.

Turns out the majority of the presentation was a rehash from the earlier session (”Exploiting Parallelism in Multicore“). However, towards the end of the presentation James went into a little more detail and also started heavily focusing on the Threading Building Blocks Toolkit (TBB) that I mentioned earlier today.

It’s always nice to have O’Reilly news at an O’Reilly conference. Here’s the latest news:

O’Reilly Media announced today the launch of a new website devoted to the provocative topics in its bestselling new book, Beautiful Code -Leading Programmers Explain How They Think ($44.99 US).

More news from Prentice Hall:

NEW SOURCEFORGE COMMUNITY PRESS TO OFFER DEFINITIVE INFORMATION ON POPULAR OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS

PORTLAND, OR - OSCON - (July 23, 2007) - Prentice Hall Professional Publishers and SourceForge, Inc. today launched SourceForge® Community Press, an alliance between the publishing house and the world’s largest repository of open source projects. The partnership creates an official source for information on open source projects hosted on SourceForge.net®, giving developers comprehensive instructional books authored by the creators of the projects themselves.

OSCON Exhibitor Prentice Hall breaks news about their agreement with SourceForge:

Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall/SAMS Launch
New Ubuntu, AJAX and Ruby Books at OSCON

Prentice Hall Announces Publishing Alliance with SourceForge, Inc.

Portland, OR — July 23, 2007 - Addison-Wesley Professional (AW), Prentice Hall Professional (PH) and SAMS Publishing today announced the release of new cutting-edge books for the open source community, including The Official Ubuntu Book, second edition, and new titles for AJAX and Ruby programmers, including Enterprise AJAX: Strategies for Building High Performance Web Applications, RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails™ and The Professional Ruby Collection. The announcement was made at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), in Portland, Oregon.

I’m excited to be back in Portland for O’Reilly’s Ubuntu Live and OSCON conferences! Today I’m covering the Ubuntu Live conference that focuses on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ubuntu has clearly taken the Linux world by storm and having a conference dedicated to Ubuntu sounds like a great idea. O’Reilly enjoys a long history of bringing together developers from all corners of globe and this new conference promises do that for Ubuntu.

I first attended James Reinders “Exploiting Parallelism with Multicore” talk where James covered the background and pitfalls of moving from a single core to a multi-core world. James set the stage nicely when he talked about Moore’s Law and why we’re moving to a multi-core world and not keeping our age old focus on making faster and faster processors. As Moore originally stated, the density of transistors on silicon keeps doubling every 18 months, even today. But three unvoidable pitfalls exist that prevent Intel from cranking out faster and faster processors:

More information from our friend Joe Panettieri:

Mini VAR Case Study: Ubuntu Linux in K-12 School

50 Things You Need to Know About Ubuntu (40-31)

Mitch Kapor: Open Source Meets Harry Potter

OSCON is super place to make announcements, the first out of the starting gate is conference Sponsor/Exhibitor Snaplogic:

PORTLAND, OR (OSCON) - July 23, 2007 - SnapLogic, an Open Source data integration platform, has released a new, enhanced version of its flagship data services product.

Brief, but nice mention of Ubuntu Live’s schedule:

The first ever Ubuntu Live Conference kicks off today, 7/22/07, in Portland.

Brian Broffitt’s take on the news from Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote:

In this morning’s first keynote of the Ubuntu Live conference here, Canonical Ltd. founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the next Long Term Support release of Ubuntu.

Michael covers keynotes at Ubuntu:

His (Mark Shuttleworth) talk centered around how the free operating system his company funds and supports is capable of bringing the same values it brings to the desktop — ease of use, performance and compatibility — to the server.

Stephen O’Grady “Ubuntu Must ‘Play To Its Strengths” to Beat Microsoft”

This blog entry compares the agenda for the RailsConf stateside and RailsConf Europe:

It looks like RailsConf Europe in Berlin, Germany (17-19 September 2007) is concentrating on Flex

Another announcement from Canoncial:

UBUNTU LIVE, Portland, OR, July 22, 2007 - Canonical announced today the availability of Landscape, its web-based systems management tool for Ubuntu servers and desktops.

Event co-sponsor, Canonical is the first out of the gate with an announcement:

UBUNTU LIVE, Portland, OR, July 22, 2007 - Canonical today announced the beta release of the Launchpad Personal Package Archive (PPA) service, a new way for developers to build and publish packages of their code, documentation, artwork, themes and other contributions to free software.

Joe Panettieri is covering Ubuntu Live, here are a few posts on TechIQ:

Ubuntu Linux: 6 Million to 12 Million Users

Ubuntu Preparing Managed Services, Small Business Server for VARs

Ubuntu Creator Reaches Out to Novell, Red Hat

And one more, this time in MuniWireless:

Ubuntu Linux emerges for digital inclusion, mobile devices.

I happened to be right behind this blogger as Mark Shuttleworth gave his Keynote presentation. It’s in Italian but it’s fun to see the international coverage:

Ubuntu Keynotes

By all accounts, the Summit “Premiere Dinner” in San Francisco was a great networking event, as well as being a planning session of sorts for the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit. Industry pundit Kara Swisher had the following to say:

Web 2.0 Dinner and Schmoozefest

Joe writes a nice blog entry about Ubuntu…

I’m packing my bags and plan to attend a new open source event — Ubuntu LIVE

This is a nice overview that compares the top two linux shows, makes for interesting reading:

What is on your OSCON agenda?

More buzz about OSCON…

O’Reilly’s OSCON, the original and perhaps best open source conference takes place in Portland

This post is worth reading, if for no other reason that the crazy artwork!

The most important thing at a conference is the time between the sessions

One of the OSCON speakers is garnering some advance publicity:

Chief technology officer will be speaking at open source convention OSCON 2007

One of the many meetings of the minds at OSCON:

The Open Solutions Alliance is hosting the first in its series of Interoperability Hack-a-Thons

A blog from exhibitor Phoronix:

The Ubuntu Live conference is coming up later this month.

This is a nice article about OSA’s Hack-A-Thon:

OSA announced it is hosting the first in its series of Interoperability Hack-a-Thons at O’Reilly Open Source Convention

Leave it to Brady Forrest to have his finger on the pulse of what’s cool:

Seattle’s McLeod Residence currently has photomosaic mirrors in the bathrooms.

There were several posts regarding happenings in and around TOC, specifically:

Chris Anderson coverage

Make Magazine coverage

Iliad eletronic reading device information

Manolis Kelaidis

Artur writes about some follow up information concerning Garmin:

In Garmin’s first Where 2.0 appearance in June, the GPS company announced that it has opened up their platform for developers to use

Erin McKean, in her keynote, introduced the phrase “ambient knowledge” and we were hoping someone
would use that in a story. Steve Paxhia was the first, read on:

The topics and presentations were provocative and there are sure to be some lively debates continuing on for months to come…

This is what we want to hear, attendees excited about the OSCON conference!

Coming Up Quickly! The 2007 O’Reilly OSCON Is Happening July 23-27 in
Portland, Oregon. Here’s Why You Don’t Want To Miss It…

Someone will snap up this free pass:

I’m happy to announce that as a Media Sponsor I’ve just been informed that LQ is able to give away one full Ubuntu Live Conference pass absolutely free of charge.

This blogger has heard correctly, Manolis earned a standing ovation for this presentation:

Manolis Kelaidis, a designer at the Royal College of Art in London, has found a way to make printed pages digitally interactive.

Reporter Jon Leland did a fine job covering the conference:

O’Reilly Conference Plots Pathways through the Digital Frontier for Publishers and Authors

We love this type of enthusiasm, let’s hope he and his co-presenter are swamped with attendees:

I’m really looking forward to having some fun with this.

A nice story about the Hack-A-Thon:

The Open Solutions Alliance, of which Talend is a founding member, is organizing its first Hack-A-Thon at OSCON in Portland, OR

Nice to see the news spread about the conference:

RailsConf Europe, taking place September 17-19, 2007 in Berlin, is being co-presented by Ruby Central and O’Reilly Media.

We’re all looking forward to partaking in this delicious event:

The Berlin Ruby User Group is throwing a pre-RailsConf party under the banner of Bratwurst on Rails.

Here is a speaker that speaks to using Ruby on Rails in the GIS space:

There is going to be 3 hr tutorial titled Rails GIS Hacks