OSCON 2004 - Ground Zero for Creative Thinking

2004’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) by O’Reilly went off well. Even though Portland’s weather was unusually hot for the end of July - a searing 100 F, almost 2000 people converged with their enthusiasm and energy to participate in this 5-day open source gathering of the gurus and hackers along with friends and family of the extended open source community. This large crowd may signal the end of the recession in the US IT industry and rejuvenation of energy and growth in the open source development community.

Technology Talks

OSCON focuses on the gurus of technology in the world of Open Source. Tutorials covering a variety of topics such as Subversion, Perl 6 rules, XSLT, Zope’s Zcatalog. There was even a PHP 5 boot camp. Technology sessions covered almost every Open Source topic under the sun. Great sessions on the latest in Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python, XML, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Java and security were well attended. Another highlight of this conference was the Emerging Topics track and its discussions about wireless Linux, Apple’s Rendezvous project to Darwinian software programming. Talk about diversity in ideas!

Michael Tiemann of Red Hat answers a question during a panel discussion on commercial open source

The State of the Linux kernel talk by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a key Linux kernel developer revealed how BitKeeper has become a part of life in the Linux development cycle and has sped up the release cycle by optimizing team coordination greatly. A panel discussion on “Commercial OSS: Business Panel” drew spirited interaction from the audience as points were made on the growth and maturity of OSS and whether it was ready for prime time. Microsoft’s Jason Matusow was perhaps the only panel participant with an opinion defending his company’s policies and direction contrary to consensus towards OSS being the only way to go in cost conscious IT markets. Brian Behlendorf of CollabNet highlighted on Asian markets being very pro-OSS. Another interesting talk by Michael Tiemann of Red Hat on the state of Fedora 2 was just right for getting a glimpse of long term positioning and strategy of the Fedora project as well as how Red Hat will as grow Linux into the enterprise market. The State of the Dolphin (MySQL) by Zak Greant and Brian Aker, developers on the MySQL team, talked about the progress that this highly-popular database had made with 5 million installations and various contributions to the OSS community.

Tim O’Reilly’s interesting keynote focused on some of the underlying trends of open source such as social networking applications like Orkut, iTunes and Amazon which have become part of the participatory universe that the OSS community lives in.

(L to R) Louis Suarez-Potts, Chris DiBona, Brian Aker, Brian Behlendorf, Zak Greant

Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions were held on various topics from Plone to e-voting and sparked discussions about issues and their resolution.

Other Highlights

A session to “Meet the Authors” featured some of the open source gurus who have written on Apache, PHP, Ruby, Digital Media and other topics. Dan Gillmor, a well-known technology columnist released his new book We the Media on grassroots journalism by the people for the people.

The SCO Moot Court organized by UC Berkeley law professor Pamela Samuelson and Groklaw founder Pamela Jones drew vociferous comments about the legal issues surrounding the ongoing Linux/SCO lawsuit in the US.

O’Reilly’s Dale Dougherty previewed “Make,” its magazine of do-it-yourself tech projects which debuts in January 2005.

A “Must Attend” conference for all open source hackers

All in all, OSCON certainly is the best US open source conference for its high value content and environment of creativity. It’s a “must attend” conference for all open source players who want to keep pace with the fast-moving world of open source technologies!