OSCON 2008 brings together more than 2500 experts, visionaries, and hackers to explore everything that open source offers. Open source has enabled developer communities and businesses to work together for the greater good, shaping a decade of innovation, collaboration, and commerce.
This year's convention promises to explore interesting developments in Linux, Java, Web, and open source infrastructure. OSCON 2008 will address current developments in topics such as mobile devices, tools and techniques for multicore development, caching and performance, virtualization, Linux on the desktop, cloud computing, the next generation of VoIP, open source as a global phenomenon, community antipatterns, and open source in education, government, and politics.
In addition to two full days of tutorials led by experts, OSCON offers more than 400 sessions organized into tracks for Administration, Business, Databases, Emerging Topics, Fundamentals, Java, Linux, People, Perl, PHP, Programming, Python, and Ruby.
Some of the sessions include:
- "Caching and Performance: Lessons from Facebook" by Lucas Nealan of Facebook
- "Even Faster Web Sites" by Steve Souders of Google
- "Linux on the Corporate Desktop: We Did It, and You Can, Too" by John Goerzen of Hustler Turf Equipment
- "Going Open Source: The 20 Most Important Things To Do" by Martin Aschoff of AGINITAS AG
- "MondoRescue: The GPL Disaster Recovery Solution" by Bruno Cornec of Hewlett-Packard
- "Shipping Rates Estimation: A Tale from IKEA" by Chunlou Yung of IKEA Direct
- "Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL" by Michael Widenius of MySQL
- "Creating and Supporting Free Software in Africa: The African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources of AVOIR Experience" by Derek Keats of University of the Western Cape
- "Groovy vs. JRuby" by Rod Cope of OpenLogic, Inc.
- "The Effects of Stress on Programmers' and Groups' Performances" by Alan Carter
- "Barely Legal XXX Perl" by Jos Boumans of RIPE NCC
- "Code Reviews for Fun and Profit" by Alex Martelli of Google
- "Ruby 1.9: What To Expect" by Sam Ruby of IBM
- "Hidden Treasures of the Zope 3 Community" by Michael Bernstein of Rogue Mountain
This year, OSCON introduces the Open Mobile Exchange, a one-day event devoted to exploring the nexus where mobile meets business, technology, the Web, and open source.
Among the many events taking place during OSCON are the Tuesday Night Extravaganza, the Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards, Birds of a Feather sessions, the Expo Hall Reception, OSCamp, the Free Geek tour, the Best of Portland Walking Tour, and more.
On Monday, July 21, Participate 08, sponsored by Microsoft, will explore the issues and opportunities presented by community development. The afternoon panel session runs from 1:30-4:30 p.m. and is open to all OSCON attendees. The moblin camp, sponsored by Intel on Tuesday, July 22, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., presents the latest on what?s happening in this rapidly growing open source area.
In Infoworld, Jon Udell described OSCON as "ground zero for the open source alpha geek tribe," while Matt Asay called the conference, "An amazing geek-a-thon...No better place on this earth to find out how to use all the cool new open source projects, and to see what's coming next." Sponsoring companies include Intel, Microsoft, Google, Sun Microsystems, Atlassian, Disney.com, Enterprise DB, Novell, OpSource, and Silicon Mechanics.
Past OSCONs have brought together representatives from companies and organizations like ACS Inc., Adobe Systems, ADP, Alfresco, Amazon, Boeing, Christian Science Monitor, Cingular Wireless, City of Portland, craigslist, CSCI, Dell, Duke University, Federal Reserve Board, General Electric, Jobster, Kansas State University, Knova Software, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Lexis Nexis, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Los Alamos National Lab, Lund University Libraries, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Motosport, Mozilla, MySQL AB, Napster, Novell, Omni Hotels, Otsuka USA, Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, PalmSource, Pentaho, Plaxo, Red Bean Software, Ruby Central Samsung, EW Scripps Company, U.S. Probation Office and Pretrial Services, University of Alaska, Verizon, WhitePages.com Inc., Xerox, and Zimbra.
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