OSCON 2008

I spent the last few days at OSCON. What a great show!

I always find it refreshing and rejuvenating to take a few days away from my daily schedule and go to an event like this, where one can see what others are doing. I never cease to be amazed by the many interesting projects and by the amount of innovation that the open source community creates.

In addition, this was the 10th anniversary of OSCON, which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the term "open source software" and it was fantastic - especially for a newbie like me - to associate with the people that were there at the beginning and that made history in the software field.

I attended several events and most of them were remarkable. I found Tim O' Reilly's keynote particularly inspiring; he highlights three challenges and opportunities for the open source community: 1) cloud computing; 2) the programmable web; and 3) mobile open source. These three areas represent the new battleground in the competition between open and proprietary. While there are now increasingly viable open source alternatives to desktop and server application, Tim reminds us how important it is that the open source community succeeds in providing alternatives to these new proprietary platforms.
There is always more than one way to get at one problem and you should always have the freedom to choose.

I also enjoyed the birds of a feather sessions and in particular the two that Pentaho's James Dixon organized: "Commercial Open Source: Deceitful Capitalists, Pioneers of a New Frontier, or both?" and "Open Source Development Using Agile Methodologies".

Another great session I really loved was Meboo's Elaine Wherry's on hiring best practices: "Code is Easy, People are Hard". Elaine is a fun and talented presenter and her presentation was very insightful and a great reminder that software products are a reflection of the team that built them. I hope to see her slides posted on the OSCON site soon.

Finally, Paul Fenwick's "An Illustrated History of Failure" was one of the most entertaining sessions and a great lesson on presentation skills. I think there is a video of this presentation somewhere but I could not find it. If you do, please let me know.

The most valuable take away from this event, however, was the opportunity to interact with people who live and work in the open source community. In many cases, they work on things that are not directly applicable to my area of focus - open source ERP - but they always manage to energize me with their passion, new ideas, and fresh thinking.