Sebastopol, CA--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.
Through sessions, tutorials, and other activities, conference-goers had hundreds of opportunities to evaluate the new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software, and standards sweeping through the open source community. They chose among tracks in administration, business, databases, desktop applications, emerging topics, fundamentals, Java, Linux, Perl, PHP, products and services, programming, Python, Ruby, and web applications.
With so much buzz focused on mobile, OSCON 2008 pioneered the first Open Mobile Exchange (OMX), devoted to exploring the nexus of where mobile meets business, technology, the Web, and open source. OMX was a day of insightful conversations, demos, technical presentations, and panel discussions for everyone involved in building out the open source mobile space. "If one thing is clear, it's that the future is mobile," Robert Strohmeyer observed for PC World on the first day of the conference.
The ways in which business is embracing open source provided another major theme this year. "The open-source community is no longer the sole province of technology geeks. The mood is shifting," wrote Esther Schindler at CIO. "Instead of open source trying to figure out its place in the enterprise, today the enterprise is seeking its place in open source."
OSCON offered participants multiple ways to engage, including a vibrant "hallway track" for attendees, speakers, journalists, and vendors to debate and discuss important issues; OSCamp, an "unconference" open to all, where the participants created the program; Birds of a Feather networking sessions; and several awards programs, such as the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards, the White Camel Awards,the Frank Willison Award, and the SourceForge.Net 2008 Community Choice Awards.
Headlining the conference were 20 keynote speakers, including:
OSCON 2008 was sponsored by Intel, Microsoft, Google, Sun Microsystems, BT, IBM, Yahoo! Developer Network, Zimbra, Atlassian, Walt Disney Internet Group, EnterpriseDB, Etelos, Ingres, JasperSoft, Kablink, Linagora Groupe, MindTouch, Mozilla, Novell, Open Invention Network, OpSource, RightScale, Silicon Mechanics, Tenth Planet, Ticketmaster, Voiceroute, White Oak Technologies, and XAware.
OSCON's exhibit hall featured the latest offerings from companies at the leading edge of open source, providing attendees with the opportunity to network while learning about new products and approaches. A full roster of sponsors and partners demonstrated real-world opportunities to conference-goers and made several important product announcements during OSCON week.
Also announced were the winners of the 2008 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards:
For complete information on O'Reilly OSCON 2008, visit:
http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon
For speaker presentation files, go to:
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/proceedings
For articles, blogs, photos, video, and other coverage of the event, go
to:
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/content/news-coverage
If you'd like to stay up to date on information relating to OSCON
conferences, sign up for the conference newsletter at:
http://elists.oreilly.com
View pictures of the conference at:
http://flickr.com/photos/x180/sets/72157606297321213
See OSCON Photo Contest at:
http://flickr.com/groups/771040@N20
View the OSCON Keynote Video at:
http://oscon.blip.tv/#1116102
See "OSCON in 37 Minutes" at:
http://www.railsenvy.com/2008/7/29/oscon-videos
To read Tim O'Reilly's take on the future, go to the O'Reilly Radar at:
http://radar.oreilly.com
To order "Open Source in the Enterprise, an O'Reilly Radar Report"
published in July 2008, or to see O'Reilly Media's wide range of open
source publications, go to:
http://opensource.oreilly.com
If you have suggestions for a speaker or a topic at the next OSCON
conference, send a message to:
oscon-idea@oreilly.com
For information about exhibiting at or sponsoring OSCON, contact: Sharon Cordesse at scordesse@oreilly.com.
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O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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