O’Reilly’s Opens Source Conference runs July 26th-July 30th here in Portland, Oregon with more than a hundred Sessions, Tutorials, Events, Exhibitors, Keynotes, Speakers and Parties. This year’s OSCON explores everything from the latest innovations in Perl, PHP, and Python to the great Linux debate and much more. If you want to attend a few sessions, day passes are still available.
Nobody is likely to have better OSCON Coverage than O’Reilly itself. Check out their Blog Coverage and Keynote streaming via IT Conversations, too. DailyWireless will hang out at the Marriot and look for insights and free beer.
Free beer can’t compare to the the global juggernaut that is Open Source.
Wikipedia defines Open source as any computer software whose source code is either in the public domain or, more commonly, is copyrighted by one or more persons/entities and distributed under an open-source license such as the GNU General Public License (GPL).
A license may require that the source code be distributed along with the software, and that the source code can be freely modifiable, with at most minor restrictions, such as a requirement to preserve the authors’ names and copyright statement in the code, a concept known as copyleft. In some cases, as with Apache or FreeBSD, there are only very minor conditions on use of modified versions.
An unprecedented gathering of top-notch presenters, leaders, and experts has been assembled.
A few include:
- Tom Adelstein - drove a legislative initiative for Open Source Software in Texas in 2003
- Brian Aker - works for MySQL as Director of Architecture
- David Allen - Open Source Intrusion Detection Systems
- Stephen Betts worked for BBC News for four years. He has been Technical Lead for many projects, such as the General Election website
- Joshua Boverhofcomputer engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the Secure Grid Technology Group
- Joel Burton - Plone/Zope web development and PostgreSQL engineering.
- Casey Chan - Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems
- Garrett Conaty- Principal Technologist with the BEA and the “Beehive” project
- Miguel de Icaza - the founder and leader of the GNOME Foundation
- Chris DiBona contributed to Open Sources book and an editor for slashdot.org website and TechTV’s The Screensavers.
- Edd Dumbill - edited O’Reilly’s XML.com and the publisher of XMLhack.com
- Esther, Freeman and George Dyson - Well known Entrepreneur, Visionary and Historian.
- Schuyler Erle - Free Software developer, activist and the lead developer of NoCatAuth.
- Mike Fitzgerald - principal of Wy’east Communications, a writing and training consultancy specializing in XML-related technologies.
- Brad Fitzpatrick - founder of LiveJournal.com, an Open Source blogging and social networking company headquartered in Portland with over 2,000,000 accounts.
- Dan Gillmor - journalist and author of “We the Media”
- Thomas Goetz articles editor at Wired Magazine
- Brewster Kahle - founded Internet Archive, the largest publicly accessible, privately funded digital archive in the world.
- Mitchell Kapor founder and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF), which is designing a new application called “Chandler” to manage email, appointments, contacts, and tasks, and easily allow information to be shared with friends, family, and colleagues. Chandler will be free of charge and will run on the Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms. The co-founder and former Chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
- Milton Ngan - recently finished working on the production of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy spent the last eight years in the visual effects industry, building up Weta Digital’s technical infrastructure from scratch.
- Jeff Norris - senior computer scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and team lead for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover Mission Science Activity Planner.
- Tim O’Reilly - founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world.
- Stormy Peters - head of HP’s open source strategy, policy, and business practices.
- Michael Radwin engineering manager at Yahoo! Inc.
- Randal Swartz - Noted Pearl author
- David Sklar author of PHP Cookbook (O’Reilly) and Essential PHP Tools (Apress).
- Greg Stein - engineering manager at Google,
- Chris Stone - Vice Chairman, Office of the CEO, of Novell
- Guido van Rossum - creator of Python, one of the major free scripting languages
- Larry Wall Writer, Author and Creator of Perl
In other news, Groklaw.net has the latest on SCO versus Novell, IBM, Red Hat, DaimlerChrysler, AutoZone and maybe Baystar.
“The beauty of open source is that it is free to all users. The only requirement to pure open source is that any improvements to an open source program must be shared with the entire community or a user must choose from one of many variant licenses”, explains Paul Campbell, Managing Partner and Co-founder of OpenSource Advisors.
The Open Source Conference in Portland is one example of the influence the open source movement. It has revolutionized software development world-wide.
This week should be interesting.
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