[OSCON]
by Jackie Hadley, Communications Associate  Dec 16, 2008  

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.

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[O'Reilly News]
by Allison Randal  Oct 01, 2008  The official word is out, OSCON 2009 will be moving from Portland, Oregon to San Jose, California. We've received significant positive feedback on the move, and messages of welcome from Bay Area open source contacts, but also some messages of disappointment from the local Portland open source community, and from non-local attendees who enjoyed visiting Portland every year. We're also... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Allison Randal  Oct 01, 2008  The official word is out, OSCON 2009 will be moving from Portland, Oregon to San Jose, California. We've received significant positive feedback on the move, and messages of welcome from Bay Area open source contacts, but also some messages of disappointment from the local Portland open source community, and from non-local attendees who enjoyed visiting Portland every year. We're also... read more

[OSCON]
by Jackie Hadley, Communications Associate  Aug 28, 2008  

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.

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[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Aug 06, 2008  

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.

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[O'Reilly Radar]
by Nat Torkington  Jul 31, 2008  Some things I learned about at the Django/Python meetup in downtown Portland during OSCON: JS Bridge: a Python to Javascript bridge for all Mozilla applications, still under very active development (i.e., changing daily). 960.gs: a grid framework for Javascript (replacing Blueprint CSS) with a naming scheme that makes prototyping designs a lot less painful. Dojo has Django Templates: I take... read more

[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Aug 04, 2008  

Our good friend Ricky Montalvo and his crew shot some great footage at OSCON. Check out their coverage and conversations here. Fishsticks?

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[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Aug 01, 2008  

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.”

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[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 29, 2008  

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.

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[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 29, 2008  

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

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[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 29, 2008  

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.

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[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 29, 2008  

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.

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[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 29, 2008  

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.

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[O'Reilly Radar]
by Nat Torkington  Jul 29, 2008  The wonderful Gregg Pollack, of Rails Envy fame, wandered the halls and speaker room at OSCON with his video camera. He asked a pile of speakers to summarize their talks in 30 seconds or less, and has compiled the results into "OSCON in 37 Minutes". It's well worth watching even if you were at the conference—as anyone who's attended knows,... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Robert Kaye  Jul 26, 2008  Today was the last day of OSCON and I'm in the mood to think about the conference and share some of my random observations that didn't make it into any of my other blog posts. First up is a comment that Brian Aker of MySQL fame made during the "Tim O'Reilly Interviews Monty Widenius & Brian Aker" interview: Microsoft... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Robert Kaye  Jul 26, 2008  After enjoying Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick's comments on the anti-patterns panel yesterday, I decided to peek into their "Do You Believe in the Users?" presentation. Ben and Fitz started the presentation with "Successful software requires more than just technical effort." as their premise and then went on to build on that premise. Ben and Fitz used the analogy... read more

[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 25, 2008  

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

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[O'Reilly News]
by James Turner  Jul 25, 2008  Alex Martelli, a well-published Python developer and Google's Uber Tech Lead, has some fairly strong convictions about code reviewing, and he's not afraid to share them. Alex believes that there's not enough code reviewing being done in the open source community, and enumerated several of his convictions for O'Reilly News at OSCON 2008. He also addresses the increasing availability of tools for organizing code reviews, and some lessons that even the largest companies can take to heart. read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Robert Kaye  Jul 25, 2008  Some of you may know Jesse Vincent as the guy who hands out snarky t-shirts like last year's "My free software runs your business" shirt. But today I got to see Jesse's more serious side when I attended his "Prophet, your path out of the cloud" presentation. He started his session by outlining why cloud computing may not be... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Robert Kaye  Jul 24, 2008  The second session of the day that really appealed to me was "An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid". When I saw that Ben and Fitz of subversion fame were joined by other open source heavy weights, I was sold on this panel. In this panel each member presented one anti-pattern in open source... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Robert Kaye  Jul 24, 2008  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... read more

[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 23, 2008  

Michael Halligan reports on his friends’ session, “How to Run a User Group” and details the series of steps he learned from the panel.

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[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 23, 2008  

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.)”

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[O'Reilly News]
by James Turner  Jul 23, 2008  O'Reilly blogger Nathan Torkington spent some time with James Turner of O'Reilly News at OSCON 2008 in Portland. He shares some of the trends and technologies that he thinks will play a big role in the near future, including open source biology and the rise of mobile computing. read more

[OSCON]
by Robert Kaye  Jul 23, 2008  

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.

They started out their presentation stating that they were not “Jabber Heads”, but that they were in the business of building web sites. For Rabble and Kellan, Jabber presents one more tool in their huge tool-chest to build web sites. Jabber wasn’t designed to be a part of a functioning web site, but they insist that it works great for building social web sites that require many people to be notified of updates.

For example, Kellan talked about FriendFeed, a site that lets their users know when their friends share new items. In this example, Kellan pointed out that FriendFeed polls Flickr 2.9 million times in order to check on updates for 45 thousand users. And of those 45 thousand users, only 6.7 thousand are logged in at any one time. This of course, its a poor way of checking for changed content. Kellan says: “Polling sucks!”

To solve this problem its key to leave standard REST web services behind and find a way to use message passing, which is a direct communication way of notifying users of changed content. The open and mature infrastructure that Rabble and Kellan found to use for this service is Jabber. Jabber has 10 years of experience of passing messages around the internet and has been embraced by many companies including Google.

XMPP, Jabber’s protocol, works well for message passing and does not have many of the problems/limitations of HTTP:

1. XMPP works over persistent connections
2. It it stateful (SSL becomes cheap)
3. Designed as an event stream protocol
4. Natively federated and asynchronous
5. Identity, security and presence are built in.
6. Jabber servers are built and deployed to do this stuff.

Given this, Kellan and Rabble decided to piggy-back a notification system on Jabber by sending XML fragments using a PubSub paradigm. In this context, PubSub is a simple method for passing XMPP pubsub stanzas via Jabber. PubSub is nothing more than a convention for how to send XML via Jabber, including a method for embedding ATOM fragments in the XML.

Rabble presented using XMPP for FireEagle, Yahoo!’s new personal geolocation service that allows users to provide their current location to other users. For a few users and a few updates you can paginate the data stream into RSS/atom feeds. But once you have more than a few users and frequent updates a paginated stream cannot keep up. What if a user publishes more updates than can an RSS feed can capture? Updates get lost — and for applications using FireEagle missing an update presents a critical flaw. Using a system like XMPP, FireEagle can rely on Jabber to deliver all the updates — exactly what Jabber was meant to do.

Kellan also applied XMPP/PubSub to Flickr and how a Flickr update “Firehose” might work. If Flickr sends a ~2k an atom enriched packet for each new public picture posted at a rate of 60 updates a second, it would take roughly a megabit of traffic. Even a normal DSL line can handle one mbit of traffic, so the network effects are manageable on this level, compared to the polling system that FriendFeed uses. (Kellan also points out that FriendFeed is not doing anything wrong at all — the current web service centric model is simply insufficient for this type of service.)

To deploy your own message passing service based on XMPP/PubSub, you’ll need to follow these 4 easy steps:

1. Get a Jabber client library. There are many available for all the popular languages.
2. Set up a Jabber server — again there are many available to choose from. Turn off the features you won’t be needing. (e.g. creating new accounts)
3. Build a component (according to Jabber XEP-0114)
4. Integrate the message passing system in your own site.

Pretty simple, overall! The beauty of this approach comes from the fact that all off-the-shelf components were used to build this new notification system. No new magic technology is being created to enable this system, which is a personal metric of mine for determining the likelihood that a new system will succeed.

It’s clear that REST web-services provide the heavy lifting for many Web 2.0 sites, but its also clear that REST and its inherent polling mechanism isn’t the best way of building a user notification system. With social networking sites not about to fade away, we’re going to see an increasing need for capable message passing sites. And since Jabber is a well established and supported system, it only makes sense to piggyback on this great technology. Thanks for the awesome presentation Rabble and Kellan!

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[O'Reilly News]
by chromatic  Jul 23, 2008  Damian Conway has a well-deserved reputation as the mad scientist of Perl. His opening night keynote at OSCON 2008 combined Perl programming, the difference engine, quantum mechanics, and general relativity to produce variables which travel backwards in time. read more

[O'Reilly News]
by James Turner  Jul 23, 2008  Larry Wall, father of perl, likens the history of perl to raising a child. In this live interview at OSCON 2008, Larry talks about perl's rebellious teen years, the role of the benevolent dictator, and dual licensing as a quantum physics phenomenon. read more

[O'Reilly News]
by James Turner  Jul 23, 2008  Anthony Baxter, one of the lead engineers working on Google's new App Engine, spent some time at O'Reilly's source convention, OSCON, talking about the features that App Engine can offer to developers. James Turner interviews Baxter for O'Reilly News at OSCON in Portland. read more

[O'Reilly News]
by James Turner  Jul 22, 2008  Pia Waugh, President of Software Freedom International sat down at O'Reilly's open source convention, OSCON, to talk about some of her interests. These include how women are entering the computer field worldwide and her work getting laptops into the hands of children across Australia and the Pacific islands. read more

[O'Reilly News]
by James Turner  Jul 22, 2008  Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, talked with O'Reilly News at OSCON, the O'Reilly open source convention. He demystifies the role that the Linux Foundation plays in helping to promote Linux use, provide legal defense, and broker cooperative work between Linux related projects. read more

[O'Reilly News]
by chromatic  Jul 22, 2008  OSCON is happening right now at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, bringing together thousands of experts, visionaries, and hackers in the trenches to explore all that open source has to offer. Today's afternoon sessions include: - Creating Location-aware Web 2.0 Applications on an Open Source Geospatial Platform - TCP/IP Troubleshooting for System Administrators - People for Geeks - Practical Erlang Programming - Porting to Python 3.0 - Hack This App! PHP Security Workshop ...and more! For the complete event schedule visit our OSCON 2008 site. read more

[O'Reilly News]
by chromatic  Jul 17, 2008  O'Reilly News interviews Allison Randal, co-chair of OSCON, for a quick survey of what's new and interesting in the world of open source. read more

[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 20, 2008  

“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.

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[O'Reilly News]
by Laura Adair  Jul 15, 2008  This year at OSCON, we're celebrating two anniversaries: 10 years of OSCON and 30 years of O'Reilly. Stop by the O'Reilly booth (#313 in the Expo Hall) to join the festivities -- and take a shot at winning some... read more

[OSCON]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jul 10, 2008  

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

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[O'Reilly Radar]
by Allison Randal  May 29, 2008  One great feature of the new conference website software O'Reilly is using this year (developed by my co-chair Edd Dumbill) is the "Personal Schedule". When you're surfing the schedule or any list of talks you can click the star beside it to add it to a private list. During the conference you can quickly view your list to make sure... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Allison Randal  May 29, 2008  One great feature of the new conference website software O'Reilly is using this year (developed by my co-chair Edd Dumbill) is the "Personal Schedule". When you're surfing the schedule or any list of talks you can click the star beside it to add it to a private list. During the conference you can quickly view your list to make sure... read more

[OSCON]
by Dawn Applegate  Aug 20, 2007  

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.

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[OSCON]
by Dawn Applegate  Aug 16, 2007  

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.

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[OSCON]
by Dawn Applegate  Aug 15, 2007  

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.

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[OSCON]
by Dawn Applegate  Aug 15, 2007  

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

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[OSCON]
by Dawn Applegate  Aug 06, 2007  

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.

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[OSCON]
by Dawn Applegate  Aug 06, 2007  

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.

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[OSCON]
by Dawn Applegate  Aug 06, 2007  

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

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[O'Reilly Radar]
by Allison Randal  Jan 07, 2008  The call for participation for the 2008 O'Reilly Open Source Convention is out. This year marks the 10th anniversary of OSCON, of the Open Source Initiative, of Mozilla, and of the term "Open Source", so a huge celebration is in... read more

[OSCON]
by Dawn Applegate  Aug 30, 2007  

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.

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[O'Reilly Radar]
by Brady Forrest  Jul 27, 2007  Steve Souders, the Chief Performance Yahoo, has opensourced a tool for finding performance flaws in websites. YSlow implements Steve's 13 performance rules as a Firebug plugin. He'll be talking about it more at his talk at OSCON today. As... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Brady Forrest  Jul 25, 2007  For the past two years the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards have recognized individuals for dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source. Past winners are Doc Searls (co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and Senior Editor for Linux Journal),... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Artur Bergman  Jul 25, 2007  At OSCON today, Intel announced the the availability of an open source library designed to help developers tackle the future of multi-core development. A C++ library released under the GPL, the Intel Threading Building Blocks SDK attempts to present a... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Brady Forrest  Jul 25, 2007  Today at OSCON the three co-creators of Django Master Class. Simon Willison, Jeremy Dunck, and Jacob Kaplan-Moss each took on three major aspects of Django to teach. They were: 1. Unit testing (Simon). First because it’s important, dammit! 2.... read more