oscon

Beyond the hype: Where open source actually saves you money

Talk to any open-source vendor (myself included), and we'll tell you that there's a lot of money to be saved by dropping your proprietary software in favor of open-source alternatives. But is that always the case? And, if so, what are the necessary preconditions for saving money?

I chaired a panel at OSCON 2009 where we explored this topic, with some interesting results.

Jeffrey Hammond, a senior analyst with Forrester, provided the underlying data, but Matt Deuel (Virgin Mobile) and Barry Klawans (San Francisco International Airport, IT&T Department) offered real-world experience deploying open-source software, while Zack … Read more

Open-source legal education comes to OSCON

If you're an open-source developer, OSCON is the closest you'll come to Mecca, whatever your religious persuasion. But OSCON has been branching out in the past few years, and this year, for the first time, it includes a a one-day, free seminar focusing on significant legal issues, called "Understanding Legal Issues in Open Source."

Given the revived interest in open-source licensing and the impact it can have on one's project or business, this strikes me as a "must attend" event.

The seminar isn't part of the official OSCON proceedings, but is free … Read more

Open source + open data = Open cloud

It used to be taken for granted that the web was and always would be open. That assumption has increasingly come under fire as cloud computing has set up walled gardens for data and services...much as the desktop has done.

Tim O'Reilly addressed the threat of closed clouds and closed mobile devices to access the web in his keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

Tim seemed to have lost interest in open source over the past few years, his interest instead turning to Web 2.0 (though he continued to recognize the need for an upgrade to the way we think of open source in terms of licenses instead of services). But somehow, somewhere, Tim re-discovered the importance of open source, this time in keeping Web 2.0 from turning into Manacle 2.0.

I'm not sure that you ever truly left, Tim, but this call to arms is timely and welcome. In his keynote, Tim said:… Read more

Open Web Foundation a new club for standards makers

Correction, 12:05 p.m. PDT: This blog initially misspelled David Recordon's last name.

At the OSCON Open Source Convention Thursday morning, David Recordon officially announced the Open Web Foundation, the meta-standards organization mentioned briefly Wednesday during the Facebook F8 conference.

Recordon, Open Platforms Tech Lead at Six Apart, told me that the OWF's mission is to bring a legal framework, consistency, and communication to the various existing Web standards efforts now under way. As he notes, projects like OAuth and OpenID are similar but being run separately. OWF will provide frameworks that existing and new projects can … Read more

The Apple imprint on open source continues

The VAR Guy was on location at the annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Despite it being an open-source conference for developers, the event was awash in a sea of (highly proprietary) Macs.

...Apple Corporate is nowhere to be seen at OSCON. Steve Jobs must be locked away, designing the next proprietary software platform tied to proprietary hardware and proprietary online Apple services. And yes, The VAR Guy will buy it.

Still, Apple is EVERYWHERE here at OSCON. The VAR Guy estimates that 20 percent to 35 percent of the crowd is carrying MacBooks or MacBook Pros....So here we … Read more

Microsoft's 'photo op' moment at open-source conference?

Due to demands at work, I wasn't able to attend OSCON (Open Source Convention) this year. I was particularly wanting to attend Microsoft's Participate08 day. I like to see what Bill Hilf, Sam Ramji, Robert Duffner, and others there are working on, to get a sense of any outbreaks of rage against the Microsoft machine.

My friend and blogging peer Zack Urlocker attended Monday and, based on his comments, I worry that I didn't miss much. I say "worry" because I expect and we need more from Microsoft than this:

While there were some good comments here or there from the audience, overall, it felt a bit like a committee examining open source from the outside looking in. We spent two hours talking about various themes and models and sociological implications but when the moderator asked the panelists to comment on what they learned, there wasn't much to say. It felt like an academic discussion to me.

This could be because the primary currency of open source is code. Microsoft has done a decent job of opening up to open-source code with Codeplex, but it has yet to engage with open source at the code level from a corporate standpoint. … Read more

The attribution problem

One of the reasons I attend O'Reilly's Open Source Conference (OSCON) is that, more so than others I go to, it gets into the intellectual and--dare I say--philosophical underpinnings of things as well as the things themselves.

To be sure, this sort of thing may not be especially important if we're talking about things like servers--although these too interact with long-term undercurrents such as massively multi-core programming  that are largely removed from day-to-day concerns but which are immensely important in the long view. In the case of Open Source, however much it has blended into the … Read more

SourceForge Community Choice Awards nominations open

Nominations are officially opening for the 3rd annual Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards. This year, for the first time, the awards will be open to ALL open source projects, not just those that count SourceForge.net as home.

There's the open nominations period, then voting on the finals, and it leads up to the awards party during OSCON at the Jupiter Hotel in downtown Portland on July 24th. Last year it was a pretty big deal, with over 500 people attending. In the past it's been a good awards ceremony, kind of wide open and fun, food and … Read more

Pendulum has swung in the open source debate

Once upon a time, the term "open source" was coined to save the free-software world from itself--or, rather, from the free-software zealots, as you can read on the Open Source Initiative's Web site.

Today, I can't help but feel that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, where we're so self-satisfied with the money we're making off open source that we have neglected the essential freedoms that make open-source profit possible.

The wake-up call about the necessary freedoms came from Eben Moglen at last week's O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Some, including software consultant Stephen Walli, don't like the way Eben said it. I wasn't in the room to hear Eben. At any rate, I'm not one for handwringing and am just glad it was said.

Why?… Read more