OSCON 2013 is a Wrap!

OSCON 2013 wrapped up last week. A good time was had by all. Time to start planning to attend OSCON 2014. It is going to be held  next July 20-24, 2014, in Portland , Oregon.

Collaborative and transparent, 'open source' projects and activities have moved from being a relatively unknown, high risk set of practices and solutions regularly 'dissed'  by the mainstream media and software industry. Today it has become widely accepted as the best way to power the next wave of innovation in cloud-based systems, 'big data' solutions, business analytics, and mobile technologies for use across the public and private sectors..

Now in its 15th year, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) is where all of the pieces of the 'open source' puzzle come together for developers, innovators, business people, and investors. OSCON is an annual  gathering of all things 'open' – from open source to open data, open access, open standards, open communities, and more. More than 3,900 people registered to attend OSCON 2013.

OSCON is  where participants find inspiration, confront new challenges, share their expertise, renew bonds to community, make significant connections, and find ways to give back to the open source movement.  It is a gathering that aims to encourage a  closer partnership between industry and the open source community in helping to build the future – helping us complete the transition into the 21st century 'Information Age'.

Some of the major press releases, news stories, or highlights  that came out during the conference last week included:

• The announced release of SUSE Cloud 2.0 that builds on the open source development of OpenStack to deliver advanced cloud technology and the broadest solution choice to ensure smooth deployment of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)private cloud into an enterprise data center. 
• IBM and Pivotal announced at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) that the two would collaborate on development of the popular Cloud Foundry development platform.
• Andy Oram noted in his blog that free software has not killed off job opportunities in the software space. Open source software is in fact creating numerous job opportunities, if the multitude of companies hiring at OSCON were any indication.
• Mark Shuttleworth, the tech entrepreneur and instigator of the Ubuntu Linux project, brought prototypes of a striking new Ubuntu phone that could be available starting in 2014
• Docker, an app container service from the co-founder at DotCloud, and Salt, an open DevOps platform from the founder of SaltStack, were mentioned this past week at OSCON as two of the most exciting new open-source efforts.
• Social networking giant Facebook announced it has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it says can execute the language as much as nine times as quickly as running PHP natively on large systems. Facebook has been using the virtual machine, called the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), across all of its servers since earlier this year.  Facebook has posted the code for HHVM on GitHub.
• Also, a number of observers shared constructive suggestions for ways to bring more women into open source. That is seen as a continued weakness in the movement.

Finally, OSCON 2013 has started posting slide presentations and videos of many presenters on their web site at http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/schedule/proceedings.  Some of the many interesting presentations already posted on the OSCON web site include:

• An Overview of Open Source in East Asia (China, Korea, Japan)
• Arduino Hacking 101: Importing the Universe
• Breaking through with Cloud Foundry
• Can Evil Corporations Embrace Open Source?
• Choose Your Own Adventure - Growing Your Own Career in Open Source
• Code Is Making Government More Effective
• Creating a User Journey for Your Open Source Community
• Harvest: Data Discovery for Humans
• How To Make Money On Open Source Today
• Internal Open Source: Running internal projects with open-source methods

See you at the next Open Source Convention (OSCON), July 20-24, 2014, in Portland , Oregon. Hopefully, next year they will consider adding a robust 'Open Health' track to the conference.

Share your personal comments and observations about your experience at OSCON 2013 with our readers.