OSCON Convention News

Open source technologies are some of the most economical choices you can make for your business and we’ve just made it a little easier to get the info you need to maximize the value open source affords: The early registration discount for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention has been extended to June 23, 2009!

At OSCON 2009, you’ll explore how to migrate from expensive commercial installations, the latest innovations in network administration designed to increase efficiency, ways to keep your system scaled and optimized for time-saving performance, and much, much more.

In just five short days, OSCON packs in the richest, most diverse open source content around. Hundreds of experts lead sessions in over 20 tracks, offering hype-free guidance to give your business a solid footing for success, from cloud computing and Linux to Python, web apps, and beyond.

OSCON takes place in San Jose, California at the McEnery Convention Center. Join with nearly 3,000 other programmers, developers, engineers, admins, educators, and managers from around the world for a nowhere-but-OSCON learning and networking experience.

Be sure to save by signing up for OSCON before the early registration discount ends on June 23, 2009.

What are the opportunities that today’s economic climate creates for open source? Register now for OSCON to take part in this and many other conversations around the business of open source when OSCON 2009 convenes July 20-24 in San Jose, California.

3,000 developers, programmers, sys admins, hackers, enterprise developers and managers, IT managers and CxOs, entrepreneurs, activists, and trainers will gather to sharpen their skills, network with experts and fellow users, and learn the latest advances in open source, including the savings and the profits it can hold for us all.

Due to demand, , so now there are over 20 topics you can follow: Administration, Apache, Business, Cloud Computing, Databases, Design & Usability, Desktop Applications, Emerging Topics, Fundamentals, Government, Java, Legal, Linux, Mobile, Mozilla, People, Perl, PHP, Programming, Python, Ruby, Security, Ubuntu, and Web Applications.

Just a few of the over-200 stellar OSCON 2009 speakers include: Rafael Almeria (Xerox), Matt Asay (Alfresco), Jono Bacon (Canonical), Deborah Bryant (OSU Open Source Lab), Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Greg Elin (Sunlight Foundation), Richard Fontana (Red Hat, Inc.), Yehuda Katz (Engine Yard Inc.), Federico Lucifredi (SUSE team, Novell), Erik Meijer (Microsoft), Chris Messina (OpenID Foundation), Stormy Peters (GNOME Foundation), Simon Phipps (Sun Microsystems), Karen Sandler (Software Freedom Law Center), Brian Shire (Facebook), Steve Souders (Google), and many, many more.

If you’re taking on new responsibilities or switching gears to work with new priorities, you’ll find out how others are meeting these same challenges and staying competitive at OSCON. Be sure to register before June 2 for OSCON to take advantage of early registration savings.

Sebastopol, CA, April 3, 2009 — Open source offers business a lifeline to economic survival, even as the economy crashes and companies flounder. The O’Reilly Open Source Convention shows the power of open source to help businesses rise above the competition in this daunting economic climate. Open source continues to thrive and grow because the open source community continues to find better ways, particularly to increase ease of use and lower the cost of deployment, to save technology costs in your organization. OSCON is the premier place to learn the latest advances and connect with leaders in this community. Registration has opened for the 11th OSCON, scheduled for July 20-24, 2009 in the new location of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. The early registration period, lasting until June 2, offers advance savings.

Program Chairs Allison Randal and Edd Dumbill reviewed almost 800 proposals in order to plan the conference around tracks for Linux, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Mobile, Databases, Desktop Applications, Web Applications, Administration, Security, People, Business, and Emerging Topics.

Read the full press release.

O’Reilly Open Source Convention Calls for Innovation
OSCON Proposals Invited

Sebastopol, CA—Dec 15 2008—Now that big business has grasped the principles of open source, the open source community can get down to business. New times demand new ideas, and OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, has opened its call for innovation. O’Reilly Media and program chairs Allison Randal and Edd Dumbill invite proposals for tutorials, sessions, and panels for OSCON, happening July 20 - 24, 2009, in San Jose, CA.

“Accomplishing great things with limited resources is the open source way of life,” says Allison. “We hope you’ll join us and share your solutions. We live in a time of enormous challenges: economic, environmental, political, and social. Open source software and the open source community have much to offer as we work to solve the world’s problems, to keep moving toward a better future.”

Read the full press release.

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

.

Read more

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.

Read all Ryan’s coverage at OSCON.

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.

LISTEN TO “Open Source City”

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.

AshMUG member John Clark soaks in the best of O’Reilly’s convention in his special guest column.

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.

Read the rest of Steven’s thoughts.

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.

Matt Asay covers and comments on the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards.

Serdar Yegulalp talks with Jim Hemlin about the potential he sees in the cloud.

Paul Krill writes about Sun’s announcements at OSCON.

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.

Darryl Taft reports on more OSCON news.

“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.

Matt Asay speculates on the predominance of Apple computers in the OSCON crowd.

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.

O’Reilly author Brian K. Jones monitors the BOF Board, reports on the “Python in 3 hours” session, and shares more Portland tips.

Sam Churchill gives a great overview of OSCON.

“Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation says Linux is the platform of choice for the mobile and embedded platforms. Zemlin will speak on the state of mobile Linux at OSCON,” writes Darryl Taft.

Roberto Galoppini on what he’s looking forward to at OSCON.

“Portvangelist” Rick Turoczy welcomes OSCON attendees with inside info on his city.

James Turner, contributing editor to O’Reilly Online, interviews Brian Aker, Director of Technology for MySQL. Brian is the author of Running Weblogs with Slash. He’s also leading a tutorial at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, July 21-25, in Portland, Oregon, titled “Memcached and MySQL: Everything You Need to Know.”

OMX, the first-ever O’Reilly Open Mobile Exchange, is for everyone involved in building out the open source mobile space, including platforms, standards, applications, hardware, integration, browsers, location, and services. This full day of insightful conversations, demos, technical presentations, and panel discussions brings together innovators from a broad swath of perspectives and backgrounds to share ideas and foster new thinking across technologies. Mobile guru Jeff Waugh is the OMX program chair–he’s putting together an agenda that will thoroughly explore the nexus of mobile and open source.

OSCON program co-chair Allison Randal has put out the call for nominations for the Open Source Awards, presented by O’Reilly and Google at OSCON.

The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2007 include Doc Searls, Jeff Waugh, Gerv Markham, Julian Seward, David Heinemeier Hansson, Karl Fogel, David Recordon, and Paul Vixie.

Deadline is May 15. Send your nominations to osawards AT oreilly DOT com.

Another deadline to keep in mind is the early registration discount–you’ll save up to $250 if you register by June 2.

This is an interesting blog entry about events at OSCON and the notion of bringing Open Systems and Microsoft together….

When I describe my job as “helping Microsoft and open source to grow together,” I get a broad range of reactions from people outside and inside of Microsoft. These reactions have included sentiments along the lines of “that must be tough,” or “you must be a glutton for punishment” on occasion.

It’s amazing how quickly these videos make it around the web. Here Robert Ottaway blogs about Steve Yegge:

So anyway Steve gave a talk at OSCON that is good food for thought.

This is a nice post about the highlights of OSCON:

Three weeks ago, I went to OSCON up in Portland. It was terrific, one of the best I’ve attended.

This is a nice round up of the whole OSCON/Portland experience:

Last week, we headed to Portland for the Open Source Convention, lovingly known as OSCON, where thousands of open source software developers, system administrators and technology lovers from around the globe came to bask in the glory of unadulterated geek-speak.

This is short, but I particularly love this part:

Portland / Ubuntu Live / OSCON. Really good times.
LinuxWorld — Weird times.

For the whole post visit:

What Andy’s been up to

Here is the final “wrap-up” release of all the news fit to print at OSCON 2007:

OSCON Press Release

Conference sponsor Intel hosted a big party Monday night during OSCON, this is a very good article that sums up what was discussed at the event:

Last week, Intel officially released the source code of Threading Building Blocks (TBB) 2.0, a C++ template library that facilitates a task-oriented approach to parallelism.

A blog entry about attending both events, Ubuntu Live and OSCON:

Ubuntu Live and OSCON were awesome. Eric and I got a bunch of good hacking done during the sessions.

More pick up on the news from Prentice Hall at OSCON:

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

Mozilla, OSCON sponsor posted this about their activities while at the conference:

Mozilla has participated in the conference for several years now and had targeted it as a major open source community and developer relations event.

Another OSCON attendee reviews his experiences at the conference:

For the last three OSCON’s I’ve been attending a meeting for people deeply involved in the operation of open source foundations. Allison Randal of the Perl Foundation and O’Reilly has done a great job of getting the foundations to talk to each other about common issues.

These are kind of fun, they give you a “slice of life” at OSCON. I think this sums it all up:

“The trip was worth every penny, every bit of effort, the lost sleep, and the crazy schedule. I learned more than I ever thought I would. I met more people than I thought I would, and I got to learn about new companies, new products, and new ideas. I really hope to be able to return next year, but that’s a year off. We’ll see how it goes at that time.”

OSCON — Day 1

OSCON — Day 2

OSCON — Day 3

OSCON — Day 4

OSCON — Day 5

From the Haskell blog, news of Simon Peyton Jones’ success while at OSCON:

At OSCON last week, Simon Peyton Jones delivered some superlative sessions.

Anytime an O’Reilly conference is “diggable” it’s good news, here’s some feedback about an OSCON panel:

Apparently this was a standing room only session and was quite well received. People were talking about this session through the remainder of OSCON.

More OSCON coverage about Microsoft’s strategy:

Microsoft has begun to talk about open source again. Sure, atheists sometimes do talk about God.

This is a pretty hard hitting article about Microsoft’s open source strategy:

Ever since the Halloween memo surfaced almost nine years ago, we’ve all known that Microsoft regards Open Source as a threat to its PC software monoculture and thus, its extremely lucrative business monopoly.

Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier comments on his take away from OSCON:

In many ways, OSCON is summer camp for geeks.

More coverage of the various announcements made at OSCON:

Last week at OSCON in Portland, Ore. three companies made three announcements regarding free and open source licensing. These are their stories.

Analyst Joe Niski had this to say about what he learned at OSCON:

One could describe OSCON as a really good developers’ conference, with plenty of technical breadth and depth. But it definitely had a sense of espirit de corps that I haven’t encountered elsewhere.

Blogger and OSCON attendee Brian Fitzpatrick’s amusing take on the conference:

Portland was, as always, a fantastic city, and I really enjoyed catching up with what I call my “second family” of conference friends that I see several times a year.

Jimmy Wales of Wikia gets some nice coverage on this blog:

“If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers,” said Wales at the developer conference OSCON in Portland, Oregon.

Here are some details on the SourceForge awards at OSCON:

SourceForge announced the winners of its second annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards during the OSCON conference.

Sean Campbell and team did many interviews from OSCON, here’s video from one of them with Intel:

James Reinders Interview

To read the results of the Google-O’Reilly Open Source Awards from OSCON follow this link and scroll down:

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

It’s always a pleasure having John Dorsey at an O’Reilly event, these are the stories he filed from OSCON:

Java at OSCON

Apatar Data Mashup Contest

Open Source and the Enterprise

Wikia Acquires Grub Search Tool

SnapLogic was a key player as an sponsor/exhibitor at OSCON, this post is fun:

The energy level was high throughout the conference. Anyone who thinks the free software movement is losing steam or is in tumult is wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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…

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

Blogger Chromatic debates which sessions to attend, a nice highlight actually:

OSCON Session Thoughts

OSCON speaker Matt Assay talks about his presentations at the conference:

Thinking through the idea further, I’m increasingly convinced that we are at a critical juncture in the evolution of the software industry.

OSCON speaker blogs about the conference:

Mike Morgan and I will be talking about the process we went through to localize addons.mozilla.org.

Program chair Nat Torkington posted the following:

I’m really looking forward to this year’s OSCON because I think we finally nailed a few things that were troublesome in the past…

Writer and good friend of O’Reilly, Matt Asay writes about OSCON’s 2007 program:

This year Nat and Allison have created the content with Tim’s help, and it looks excellent.

Mike Rogoway recently wrote about the upcoming OSCON conference:

Oregon’s best-attended annual tech conference

Speaker Kirby Urner is already beginning to blog about his presentation at OSCON:

I’m feeling like quite the lucky lab, in terms of my geek quotient

Just a few hours left to register for OSCON and take advantage of that early registration discount. Other discounts are available too, on top of what you already save with the early price.

OSCON is the annual open source gathering of choice for thousands of programmers, developers, hackers, and IT professionals. This year’s event features innovators and leaders across every open source technology, lots of extracurricular activities, a relevant Expo Hall, and the return of the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing.

And, if your open source passion includes Ubuntu, join us for Ubuntu Live, which overlaps with OSCon, July 22-24, also at the Oregon Convention Center. Registered OSCON attendees receive a nice discount to Ubuntu Live–look for the special discount code in your registration confirmation email.

Tim had a few things to say today about one of the sessions at the upcoming OSCON conference:

“I just came across this very interesting session in the OSCON schedule, entitled Programming for Low Power Usage.”

Sebastopol, CA — Registration is now open for OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. This year’s program will examine how open technologies are making breakthroughs in the mainstream IT community, and delve into the advances on the open source horizon. Now in its ninth year, OSCON is the annual gathering of developers, hackers, visionaries, and alpha geeks who are driving the open source movement. OSCON returns to the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon July 23-27, 2007.

OSCON will feature more than 400 sessions and tutorials in fifteen tracks that will cover Administration, Business Databases, Java, Linux, People, Perl, PHP, Programming, Python, Ruby, Security, and Web Applications. Also happening concurrently will be the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing, a full-day discussion and debate that will give attendees the opportunity to take part in the conversation between Tim O’Reilly and the innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders who are fostering the evolution of computing via open source technologies.

Read the full announcement on O’Reilly.com.

Join more than 2500 open source developers, gurus, experts, and users at the ninth annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention–five days of wall-to-wall sessions, tutorials, and events, plus one of the best open source show floors around and the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing.

Reserve your place now for OSCON 2007, happening July 23-27 in Portland, Oregon. Save $200 when you register by June 4.

Noted OSCON program co-chair Nat Torkington on the O’Reilly Radar recently:

The last two years, Google and O’Reilly have presented a set of Open Source Awards at OSCON. For the first time, we’re opening the nominations up to the entire open source community. The award will recognize individual contributors that have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, collaboration, in the development of open source software. The nominations process ends on the last day of April, 2007. Valid nominations will need to include the name of the recipient, any associated project/org, title, and a description of why you are nominating the individual. Google and O’Reilly employees cannot be nominated. Nominations to be sent to osawards AT oreilly DOT com.

Apparently OSCON program chair Nat Torkington has been donning his remote viewing goggles to map out the future of Web 2.0. His latest Radar post is an incredibly wry look into the next several years of high-tech (and I mean HIGH).

WARNING: This column is only for the ultra-geeky. But if you’re savvy enough to read through Nat’s razor sharp predictions, you’re guaranteed a good laugh. I ask you - what other program chair could come up with such an imaginative look into the future? Our Nat is so smart. . .

Read his post on O’Reilly Radar.

Calling all open source faithful: the call for participation for OSCON 2007 has just been unveiled. Program co-chairs Nat Torkington and Allison Randal are seeking proposals for sessions and tutorials highlighting the progress and innovation that open source is contributing to the computing industry.

We’re expecting 2500 programmers, hackers, IT managers, designers, academics, and alpha geeks joining us at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland next July 23-27. In addition to hundreds of sessions and tutorials, OSCON 2007 will also feature another edition of the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing, a big ol’ expo hall, and lots of events so even if you don’t want to participate as a speaker, be sure to mark your calendar to join us.

Eben Moglen

Over on DTF, Daniel Steinberg has posted several excellent shows from last July’s Open Source Convention in Portland. I particularly draw your attention to Eben Moglen’s talk, which is both important and inspiring to hear:

• Legal Opinions, Eben Moglen
• Metaphor, Scott Yara and Robert Lefkowitz
• Life Cycles, Mark Lucovsky, Simon Phipps, and Anil Dash
• From the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing at OSCON, Ownership, Chad Dickerson, Irwin Gross, and Roger Magoulas
• Another show from the Executive Briefing, Open Source at Microsoft, Tim O’Reilly interviews Brian Behlendorf, Danese Cooper questions Bill Hilf

“Next generation concepts in open-source technologies usher in a whole new style of journalism,” writes Dan Crawford.

Still lots of news coverage to be posted from OSCON, and I’ll try to make a little more headway today. First up: Adam Doxtater over at MadPenguin just sent me info on an interview he and fellow MPer Narayan Newton conducted while at OSCON:

After the announcement of the new Google Code service at OSCON 2006 in Portland Oregon, we had the distinct pleasure of sitting down and talking with Google’s Open Source Program Manager, Chris DiBona and their Lead Open Source Engineer, Greg Stein in a little more detail.

Fellow Portland Perl hacker Chris Dawson has just uploaded the OSCON Roundup podcast to the PDX.pm podcasts archive. On Wednesday night, 09 August, the Portland Perl Mongers shared their new knowledge and experiences attending, volunteering, and organizing OSCON 2006. There are several good nuggets of information there.

Editor Cal Evans sent me a nice note: “Again, had a ball, looking forward to next year.” Likewise, Cal! He’s posted some final thoughts about his OSCON experience:

The goddess’ of the O’Reilly Conference Team have yelled “cut” the set is struck and everybody has gone home. Speakers are busily reviewing the evaluation forms and tuning their presentations for the next round and the attendees are sorting through the T-Shirts. (Keepers or dust-rags) Let’s glance over our shoulder at what was OSCON06.

If you missed ‘em, you can read all of Cal’s OSCON postings in one place, and take a gander at his Flickr group.

On the final day of OSCON, the good people over at HP announced the winners of the photo contest they sponsored. Official conference photographer and judging panel member James Duncan Davidson reported that it was difficult to choose, but in the end, grand prizes went to Steve Elgersma and Ted Leung; runners up were Premshree Pillai and Dustin Tinney.

We received some excellent OSCON coverage in the local media, including this piece by Mike Rogoway on Eben Moglen’s inspiring keynote that ended the convention on a very high note:

A weeklong conference of open source developers ended Friday in Portland with a battle cry. Eben Moglen, legal counsel to Free Software Foundation, declared that the war against closed, proprietary software controlled by Microsoft and others is far from won. “Do not think for an instant that the powers of the 20th century have faded away,” the Columbia University law professor warned hundreds of software developers at the closing address of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention at the Oregon Convention Center.

“Robert Kaye blogged the same OSCON session I wrote about on Friday, What Happens When the Money Comes,” writes Tim O’Reilly, “and captured a few good anecdotes that I left out of my account…However, I wanted to expand on Robert’s retelling of my story about a signature open source moment I experienced at an X Consortium meeting sometime in the late 80s or early 90s.”

Matt Asay boils down his OSCON 2006 presentation:

Earlier this week I delivered a presentation at OSCON 2006 entitled “Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses.” I’ve been involved with commercial open source since 1998, and have learned a lot over the years (including how to fail spectacularly and slightly more gracefully). I’m in the middle of a string of successes, though, and figured now was the time to pretend to know-it-all. You can view my OSCON 2006 presentation here. It was an extension of some JBoss analysis I did recently, as well as an attempt to pass on some of the lessons I’ve learned so that the next round of open source commercialization will avoid my mistakes.

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.