2004.11_Party in Portland-the Oscon Developers Conference.pdf

COMMUNITY

Oscon 2004

Party in Portland

T he Open Source Convention

The OSCON developer conference, which was organized by O’Reilly Publishing,

(OSCON), July 26 through 30, was

an amazingly well-attended con-

ference that attracted 1700 Open

Source-hungry visitors to Portland, Ore-

gon for a first-hand look at the latest

developments in Open Source projects.

The show’s sponsor is O’Reilly, and the

line-up for the conference closely resem-

bled O’Reilly’s own Open Source book

line, with presentations on topics such as

Apache, Perl, PHP, XML, Python,

MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Open Source

security. Featured speakers included an

assortment of CEOs, journalists, and his-

torians, as well as the noted physicist

Freeman Dyson, author of The Sun, the

Genome, and the Internet . But the real

business of the conference was down in

the conference tracks, where visitors

heard the latest on a range of topics from

Java to Ruby.

had far better attendance than expected. At the heart of the show was the rev-

olutionary new Perl6 and the open Community information portal funded by

Tim O’Reilly. BY MICHAEL SCHILLI

books and calendars to produce a gen-

uinely useful open data collection.

Novell’s David Patrick announced that

Novell had canceled all its Microsoft

license agreements at the end of March

this year and would be migrating all

6000 employees to Linux desktops by the

end of 2004.

The technical conference tracks indi-

cated that a move from the legacy CVS

version control system to Subversion is

in progress. More and more high-profile

projects, such as Apache, Samba,

Debian, and of course Subversion itself,

are using the technically superior

Subversion system for tough daily pro-

duction work.

The Security track was a new addition

to the conference lineup, with sessions

on “Credibility of Election Software,”

“Spam Filtering at Open Source Prices,”

and “Foiling Cross-Site Attacks.” A track

called “Emerging Topics” offered a grab

bag of interesting subjects, from “Dar-

winian Software Programming” to “Why

Data Stinks.”

Conway and the winner of the “Open

Source Awards” Gold Medal (and

$ 10,000 prize money), Larry Wall,

introduced the breathtaking object and

regex syntax of Perl6. Implementation

dates for Perl6 have not been fixed

so far. The Perl5 Community was

unfazed by the announcements, how-

ever, introducing a flood of new CPAN

modules.

A Big Success

O’Reilly attracted an impressive list of

corporate sponsors for the show, includ-

ing Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Sun,

BEA, Red Hat, and even Microsoft.

(Believe it or not, Microsoft always loves

to get its name in front of an Open

Source audience.)

The attendance figures were a pleasant

surprise to the organizers. Many of the

half or full-day tutorials that traditionally

take place before the conference begins

were sold out. People who would have

paid good money to attend were left out-

side. Packed-to-overflowing conference

rooms showed that the industry indeed

has cash to spare for conferences,

demonstrating the rapidly growing inter-

est in open software.

Growing Importance of

Open Content

In his keynote, conference sponsor Tim

O’Reilly stated that it was not enough to

guarantee open access to code. He

underlined the threat of a data lock-in

and stated that community-generated

data, such as product recommendations

in Amazon or Google Mail email

archives, should not be in the hands of a

few providers, locked away from the

general public. O’Reilly called on the

Open Source Community to ensure that

this kind of data stayed “open.” “Open

Content” is the new buzzword. He called

for the “napsterizing” of virtual address

Perl6 Imminent

One of the highlights of the conference

was the Perl track, where Damian

■

Figure 1: Tim O’Reilly giving his keynote. Massive attendance figures caused a crush in the exhibition hall, with conference visitors holding their breath while

Larry Wall introduced Perl6 design concepts.

November 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

Oscon Developer Conference 2004

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