The O'Reilly Open Source Convention is where coders, system administrators, entrepreneurs, and business people working in free and open source software gather to share ideas, discover code, and find solutions.
Ryan Paul :
Fortunately, I’m not the only open source software enthusiast who doesn’t buy into what I view as Stallman’s hysteria and defeatism. Earlier this year, tech publisher Tim O’Reilly discussed the issue during a keynote presentation at the annual O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON). O’Reilly acknowledged the challenges posed by cloud computing, but he also pointed out that the vibrant open source software community has already started exploring experimental solutions
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Sebastopol, CA- O’Reilly’s Tenth Annual OSCON Explores Open Source’s Dynamic Future-
Open Source Community Prepares for Challenges and Opportunities Ahead
More than 3,000 developers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries attended the 10th annual OSCON in Portland, on July 21-25, and they left knowing that the open source community is stronger than ever.
Program chairs Allison Randal, Edd Dumbill, and the OSCON program committee chose from more than 700 proposals and produced five full days of stirring talks and practical demonstrations at the cutting edge of technological and commercial innovation. Rich in content and inspiration, the convention featured the key players and issues influencing open source today, and it explored the greatest potential for open source tomorrow.
Read full press release.
Ryan Paul of ARS on his experience at OSCON 2008:
The event, which started ten years ago as a venue for bringing together Perl enthusiasts, has grown into one of the most important open source conventions in the United States.
Paul Krill writes about what OSCON had to say about mobile computing:
The iPhone attracted attention at the conference. An audience member during a morning keynote presentation event asked why the open source world has not done anything as “insanely great” as iPhone.
Read more.
Sean Michael Kerner sums up OSCON 2008:
Tim O’Reilly (you know the guy who runs the big tech publisher) is still bullish on the prospect of open source. After 10 years of running the OSCON conference he still sees innovation on the horizon.
Read more.
Paul Krill reports on the Open Web Foundation announcement at OSCON 2008:
The Open Web Foundation, a non-profit organization intended to help create an “Open Web,” was announced Thursday at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. Specifically, the organization is dedicated to the development and protection of non-proprietary specifications for Web technologies. The effort was announced by David Recordon of blogging tools maker Six Apart.
Read more.
Esther Schindler Recaps OSCON 2008 and Tim O’Reilly’s Keynote Address:
While celebrating the many accomplishments of free software, O’Reilly put most of his attention on the new challenges where open source could-and in his opinion should-make a difference. And he brought several people on stage to back up his points. “We have to pay attention to the real consequences to the wave we’ve unleashed,” he said.
Read more.
David Miller came to OSCON and interviewed Jim Zemlin, Raven Zachary, and Rick Turoczy:
It’s open source time again in Portland: the Open Source Convention, or OSCON, is back in town. Of course, you could argue that every day is open source day in Portland. The inventor of the wiki lives here. So does Linus Torvalds of Linux fame. As do a number of companies based on open source architecture, like the Collaborative Software Initiative.
Tim Bray offers more notes on his OSCON Keynote:
Here are all the missing pieces, should you want to watch it (only 15 minutes, remember); plus a little extra commentary.
Esther Schindler came home from OSCON with thoughts on growing the size of the pool in open-source development communities. And it’s all upbeat news.
Michael Dory, Adam Simon, and Scott Varland of Socialbomb presented a tutorial on Arduino hacking at last month’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention:
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
In this tutorial, participants will learn how to create devices for sensing and communicating with the physical world using the Arduino platform.
Read the rest of the tutorial.
Our good friend Ricky Montalvo and his crew shot some great footage at OSCON. Check out their coverage and conversations here. Fishsticks?
Slashdot on some of OSCON’s greatest hits:
An anonymous reader writes “Infoweek wraps last week’s event with Inside The OSCON 2008 Conference, which pulls together interviews with Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin, MySQL’s Zach Urlocker and Sam Ramji, who directs Microsoft’s Open Source Lab. Best quotes: ‘We will make a significant attempt to elevate the Linux desktop to the point where it is as good or better than Apple,’ from Shuttleworth; and ‘If I would start a business tomorrow I’d do it in the netbook marketplace. I’d build a dead-simple $200 device that targets sports fans, women over forty,’ from Zemlin.”
Serdar Yegulalp brings all his OSCON coverage together.
We round up our coverage of the open source OSCON 2008 conference. Don’t miss Q&As with Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth and The Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin. Check out the photo gallery, too.
See all of Serdar’s terrific coverage here.
While he couldn’t attend the conference in person, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been following the news about OSCON and thinks that OSCON displayed the friendliest things ever seen to come out of Microsoft towards open source.
Gavin Clarke writes, “The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is the latest casualty of Google’s decision to remove open-source licenses from its popular code hosting service.
The search giant has said Google Code is no longer accepting projects licensed under MPL, although existing MPL-licensed code is allowed to stay.”
See the entire article.
Don’t complain about your situation; do something about it.
That’s the gist of what Danese Cooper, senior director of open-source strategies at Intel, said in her keynote at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention here. Cooper said her talk, titled “Why Whinging Doesn’t Work,” was initially written for women, and she gave a version of it at a women’s conference recently. Cooper said she came up with the idea for the talk after receiving an e-mail from Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, saying, “Can you girls please stop whinging about this?’”
Read the rest of Darryl Taft’s piece here.
Dana Blankenhorn categorizes the OSCON crowd, i.e. tribe, as visioneers, geeks, suits, wannabees, and users in this overview.
At the OSCON open source convention in Portland last week, Neuros CEO Joe Born explained how Linux-based embedded devices will bring open source to the set-top market and the consumer electronics space. He also demonstrated how to build applications for the Neuros OSD, his company’s programmable DVR product.
Read the rest of Ryan Paul’s analysis here.
While all the other “nytimers” are running around having interesting discussions, I thought I’d do a quick blog post.
Yesterday’s OSCON sessions were great overall, but there were a couple that really stood out for me.
Read about the sessions that most interested Nick Thuesen.
Serdar brings us all the way to Friday:
There’s a part of me that thinks Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Open Source Lab, has the worst imaginable job at Microsoft. But he doesn’t see it that way: Where other people would see such a position as being crushed between two wholly opposed forces (Microsoft and open source), Sam sees it as a way to build a bridge that didn’t exist before — and maybe to transform Microsoft all the more from within.
Read the whole story
Aside from having one of the niftier names in the industry, Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier has a pretty nifty job, too: He’s the openSUSE Community Manager at Novell (NSDQ: NOVL), where he oversees the folks that help make what will ultimately turn into the next version of SUSE Linux Enterprise. I grabbed a few minutes of his time to follow up on things I’d talked to him about back at theRed Hat (NYSE: RHT) Summit.
Thursday, and the prolific Serdar continues his coverage.
On Wednesday I sat down at OSCON with a slew of people from Sun Microsystems to talk about key parts of their empire, both new and old. First up was Zack Urlocker of MySQL (whom I’d observed at the Monday Participate 08 panel), one of the newest additions to the Sun galaxy, and an acquisition that’s caused a great deal of worry amongst existing MySQL users.
Serdar reaches the middle of OSCON in this Wednesday report.
Let’s rewind a bit. My Monday afternoon at OSCON 2008 was taken up by “Participate 08,” a Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)-sponsored discussion panel chaired by a whole panoply of folks — including, yes, an open source liaison from Microsoft. The whole thing was neither a “corporate apologia” (as one wag put it from the audience) nor a pile-on where Microsoft got the worst of it. Their approach was only one of a diversity of perspectives, and sometimes not even the most eyebrow-raising.
Serdar Yegulalp continues his OSCON reports.
Mobile computing has become a dominant focus in the open source arena, a theme on prominent display at a major open source technology convention last week.
The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., highlighted mobile efforts along with Linux, Web computing, and languages. Mention of various mobile efforts abounded, including LiMo (Linux Mobile), Intel’s Moblin, and the Google-backed Android platform.
Read more of Paul Krill’s summary of Mobile at OSCON.
By most estimates, Linux and other open-source operating systems represent about 1 percent of the PC market. But on mobile devices, Linux is growing fast. As of 2007, more than 18 percent of all embedded devices–from cell phones to PDAs to e-book readers–ran a Linux-based OS, while less than 17 percent ran embedded Windows. So it’s no great surprise that this year’s OSCON open-source conference is leading off with a new program focused specifically on mobile gadgets.
Read more of Robert Strohmeyer’s coverage.
Tim O’Reilly’s OSCON keynote encouraged the open-source community to pay attention to three main challenges: Cloud computing, the open programmable Web and open mobile. Another speaker exhorted attendees to get involved in another larger effort.
Read more of Esther Schindler’s report.
Serdar Yegulalp writes, “I’m still sorting through the last bits of my OSCON trip notes, but one striking conversation I had was with Byrne Reese of SixApart about people who violate open source licensing of for-pay editions of OSS apps. Do we sic the open source cops on them?”
Read their answer here.
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.
“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.
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.
“One of the reasons that I attend O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference (OSCON) is that, more so than others I go to, it gets into the intellectual and—dare I say—philosophical underpinnings of things as well as the things themselves,” says Gordon Haff in this thoughtful piece on the issues raised by the Participate 08 panel.
