Press Release
August 7, 2006
O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2006: Opening Innovation and Embracing Community
Sebastopol, CA--OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, wrapped up in
Portland, Oregon last week. This annual gathering, now in its eighth
year, once again immersed members of the open source community in a rich
and diverse learning experience, examining core open source technologies
as well as promising new ones. The event drew just over 2700 participants
from every free and open source denomination, making it the largest OSCON
to date. With sixty-five sponsors, exhibitors, and community projects, the
show floor was also the largest in the event's history.
OSCON is the place to take stock of the current state of open source
technologies and their future prospects, and to galvanize the community to
continue to take action on behalf of software freedom. "It was interesting
to hear speakers and keynoters say 'open source has won,'" remarked OSCON
co-chair Nathan Torkington. "We might have won acceptance within business,
but that's not the biggest battle. Open source is about freedom, and
economic success comes because of, not in spite of, that freedom. Eben
Moglen of the Free Software Foundation reminded us that the fight for
source freedom is not over, and Tim O'Reilly and Simon Phipps pointed out
that the battles for open standards and open data are just beginning."
Of particular note at this year's OSCON was the debut of the O'Reilly
Radar Executive Briefing, an intimate gathering with innovators,
entrepreneurs, and companies that are currently on the O'Reilly Radar.
Organizers Tim O'Reilly and Matt Asay assembled participants with a wide
range of experiences and expertise, from Adrian Holovaty, Avi Bryant, and
Mark Spencer to Marten Mickos, Chad Dickerson, and Mark Lucovsky.
OSCON offered hundreds of keynotes, sessions, and tutorials, but
networking in the form of evening activities and ancillary events proved
to be almost as popular as the technical sessions. OSCamp, spearheaded by
Brandon Sanders and OSCON co-chair Allison Randal, took place throughout
the convention, giving all comers the opportunity to create their own
conference program. Damian Conway and Larry Wall headlined the Opening
Night festivities on Tuesday. Mozilla offered a Firefox Flicks screening.
Tim O'Reilly and biologist Richard Jefferson had an on-stage conversation
about the relationship of open source and science at McMenamin's Crystal
Ballroom, followed by a live musical performance. Local tours, parties,
and birds of a feather sessions extended conversations into the wee hours.
Sponsors of this year's convention illustrated the diversity of open
source adoption: Autodesk, Greenplum, Sun, HP, IBM, Ticketmaster,
ActiveState, AMD, Covalent, Dell, Google, Hyperic, Intel, Laszlo,
MindTouch, Oracle, Port25, Shopzilla, SixApart, Solid, Techtracker Media,
The 451 Group, OTBC, Yahoo!, and Zend. OSCON has become an important place
for companies to make announcements, and this year's event was no
exception:
ActiveState Software Inc. announced the technical pre-release of Komodo
4.0, introducing advanced support for Web 2.0 technologies to the
award-winning IDE for dynamic languages
Covalent Technologies announced it will begin distributing the WSO2
Tungsten SOA Application Server to enterprise customers; Covalent is also
partnering with WSO2 to provide full commercial support for the Apache
Axis2 project
WSO2 announced the formation of its board of directors and advisory
board
MindTouch unveiled MindTouch Dream, an open source Web 2.0 API for
Microsoft .NET and announced the appointment of an inaugural Board of
Directors and Advisory Board
MindTouch and VISI launched ViaWiki, a hosted web creation and
collaboration application that allows anyone to create and edit web pages
quickly and easily using a web browser
CollabNet and O?Reilly Media announced a partnership to market and sell a
joint software development solution for distributed developer networks and
communities
Scalix Corporation announced that it will turn its popular Scalix
Community Edition free software product into an open source project
Six Apart announced it has created an open source modular, scalable, high
performance Jabber server that enables others to integrate their services
with Jabber and LJ Talk, LiveJournal's new instant messaging and voice
service
Google announced a new service for open-source developers called Project
Hosting, which allows developers to upload their own open-source projects
and search for others
Alfresco Software Inc. announced full Open Document Format (ODF) support
through its ODF Virtual File System
Kysoh unveiled their new Tux Droid, a wireless programmable robot
specifically designed for the Linux platform
Webtide, a new services company that provides training, development and
support services for Web 2.0 applications, was formally launched during
OSCON
Dates for OSCON 2007 were also announced. OSCON will return to the Oregon
Convention Center July 23-27, 2007.
Several award ceremonies take place annually at OSCON:
Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards were presented to: Peter Lundblad,
Best All-around Developer, Subversion; Gervase Markham, Best Community
Activist, Firefox; Cliff Schmidt, Best Legal Eagle, Apache; Julian Seward,
Best Toolmaker, Valgrind; Stefan Taxhet, Best Corporate Liaison,
OpenOffice.org
White Camel Awards were presented to: Josh McAdams, the host of Perlcast;
Jay Hannah, Perl Mongers; Randal L. Schwartz, tireless advocate of Perl
and the community of Perl
Willison Award laurels went to Alex Martelli for outstanding
contributions to the Python community
HP Photo Contest: grand prizes went to Steve Elgersma and Ted Leung;
runners up were Premshree Pillai and Dustin Tinney
OSCON is where people working in free and open source software gather to
share ideas, debate, make deals, and plan for the next round of open
source innovation. OSCON brings together leaders, developers, hackers, and
practitioners of every open source persuasion to plumb core issues in the
open source community. From business, databases, emerging topics, Java,
Ajax, Linux, Perl, PHP, Python, security, Ruby, web apps, multimedia,
Microsoft Windows-based open source projects, and so much more, OSCON
investigates what's possible in open source.
Additional Resources:
Other Upcoming O'Reilly Conferences:
- O'Reilly European Open Source Convention, September 18-21, 2006 in Brussels, Belgium
- Web 2.0 Conference, November 7-9, 2006 in San Francisco, California
- O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, March 26-29, 2007 in San Diego, California
- MySQL Users Conference, April 23-26, 2007 in Santa Clara, California
- RailsConf, May 17-20, 2007 in Portland, Oregon
- Where 2.0 Conference, June 19-20, 2007 in San Jose, California
- O'Reilly Open Source Convention, July 23-27, 2007 in Portland, Oregon
About O'Reilly
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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