For the past few years, I've meant to attend the Open Source Convention (better known as OSCON) in Portland, Oregon, but never quite made it. Besides the promotional material put forth by O'Reilly Media, the organizers of the convention, I've heard the tales of the convention over the past seven years. The post-convention stories of this convening of open-source fans have been quite interesting. This was clearly the place to be, the techie convention to top all others.

Figure 1. Tim O'Reilly (photograph by James Duncan Davidson)

This year, I finally managed to get myself there. I'm happy to report that OSCON is the cool convention of the year. I went to LinuxWorld Expos in both Boston and San Francisco this year--well organized and popular as they are, they don't have the same spirit as OSCON.

I also went to the new Red Hat Summit this year as well as a more specialized one that I like in particular, the MySQL User Conference. I wasn't thrilled with the Red Hat Summit, but it was the first one. Although I feel more at home at the MySQL UC, as I'm big on MySQL, OSCON by definition was more well rounded. So, unless you're strictly a MySQL fan, OSCON was the best conference so far this year, based on my experiences and others have told me of the conferences I wasn't able to attend.

What seems to make OSCON interesting, cool and fun is the collection of people attending and perhaps the location. As I mentioned in an earlier article on the Red Hat Summit, technology conventions now seem to be the dominion of big corporations. I don't mind companies being involved, I simply prefer community driven and aligned ones, such as like O'Reilly and MySQL. O'Reilly organizes OSCON and a few other conferences. In talking with one of the marketing people from O'Reilly while walking back to our respective hotels from a party late one night, I learned that "At O'Reilly, although we make profit on many of our books, we're not about profit as much as other publishers. We're more into assisting in the building of software communities. As a result, we organize OSCON and other conferences even though they may not be profitable to us. It's part of who we are." This profundity that came forth while stumbling through the streets of Portland late at night, and it illustrates what makes OSCON work: it's a convention for the Open Source community, organized and protected by O'Reilly.

Talks were given by all of our tech heros and the like, including Tim O'Reilly, founder and head of O'Reilly Media. He gave a couple of talks, including a keynote address, one of which was quite frank on the tech book business. I heard several people commenting on it in the hallways. I hope the organizers put a copy of it on the O'Reilly Web site, as people who were there already are quoting it. My buddy Zak Greant spoke on optimizing MySQL. Luke Welling and Laura Thomson (writers of MySQL Tutorial by MySQL Press) came in from Australia and gave a talk on PHP and MySQL. And the editor of XML.com, a nice guy named Edd Dumbill, flew in from England to conduct the Mono Boot Camp.

Figure 2. Audience Asks Questions (photograph by James Duncan Davidson)

Being a Perl fan, I was delighted to hear Larry Wall give his traditional "State of the Onion" talk. He's such a neat guy and a great linguistic leader for the Perl community. If you're a member of the Perl Monastery, you probably recognize the names Ovid, merlyn (aka Randall Schwartz) and chromatic, all of whom spoke at the show. Randall Schwartz was also at the Stonehenge booth with Tom Phoenix and brian d foy promoting their Perl books, as well as their consulting services and training programs. Damien Conway, another of Perl elite, gave a few presentations as well. Many more impressive presenters were on hand; I've listed only some of my favorites here.

One evening offered a book signing organized by Powell Books and O'Reilly, during which attendees were able to meet many authors. Again, chromatic was there signing his new book Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. Randall Schwartz and friends were promoting the new edition of Learning Perl, always a good value. David Sklar, author of Learning PHP, and Adam Trachtenberg, author of Upgrading to PHP5 and a few other books, also were there, along with Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling, authors of High Performance MySQL, an excellent book on MySQL, and several more authors. It was a great chance to get autographed copies of your favorite tech books and to say a few words to your favorite authors.

Figure 3. Author Book Signing (photograph by James Duncan Davidson)

After hours, several parties took place each night. Some were easy to get attend. Some required a connection or a tip as to the time and location. All were worth attending. The Perl authorities at Stonehenge hosted their much talked about party at Ground Kontrol, a video game bar. They treated us to free beer, soft drinks and plenty of pizza. All of the free video games were set to free, as in freedom and free beer. When the party started, there was a line out the door of people wearing their free Stonehenge t-shirts waiting to get in.

At one of the neighboring hotels (the DoubleTree), MySQL hosted a party with free drinks, excellent snacks and t-shirts with a No-Software-Patents message on the back. Some women from Virtuas were handing out invitations to a cocktail party at another hotel at the same time. I couldn't make it, but I ran into them at Denny's around 1 am. I also missed the Friends of O'Reilly party in a suite at the DoubeTree, but I heard from a newly acquired friend, Jinny Po Potter, who went in my stead, that it was a great party. She had the fortitude to run the whole stretch of the MySQL party and still manage to close down the FOO party--a real open-source trooper. Incidentally, that's what's spectacular about OSCON: because about 1,200 people attend, and all are worth knowning, you can make new friends at OSCON and run into people throughout the convention center neighborhood at all hours of the night.

The vendor exhibit hall had quite a few exhibitors. It wasn't overwhelming like LinuxWorld, but there was a nice showing. Some vendors overlook this convention, even though Portland is not far from their bases of operation, for example, Seattle and San Francisco. Some smaller groups, however, had interesting booths: the Perl Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Women's Technology Cluster, the Free Standards Group, the PostgresSQL guys, the Mozilla Foundation and quite a few others all were on hand. O-Soft was on site too, with its Thout Reader. At the booth, a young woman was walking around with a costume in which she was riding a large stuffed bird, similar to the one in the O-Soft business logo. It was pretty hilarious to see.

Figure 4. The O-Soft Bird (photograph by James Duncan Davidson)

Probably the coolest booth was the Gibson booth. It had a bunch of sweet looking electric guitars set up with headphones and stools for people to sit down and enjoy playing. They also had a drawing for one of the guitars at the end. Apparently, Gibson has figured out that a lot of open-source people also play electric guitars. It's a nice crossover market for them and a treat for the attendees. As another treat, Google sent the Google Girls to run a booth. I'm never sure what it is they're promoting, since everybody seems to already use Google, but they're easy on the eyes.

Figure 5. The Gibson Booth (photograph by Jinny Po Potter)

If you were looking for me, I spent a good bit of time over at the MySQL booth with David Axmark, the co-founder, and Kelly Kimble. David Axmark participated in a session on the "State of Databases", in which he talked about the state of MySQL in general and how version 5.0 of MySQL is coming along. It contains many enterprise features, including stored procedures, views and triggers. Version 5.0 is nearing stable release.

Figure 6. The MySQL Team (photograph by Jinny Po Potter)

Overall, OSCON was an excellent conference. If you're only going to attend one conference a year, this is the one to hit. There are plenty of parties, a lot of interesting people--famous and regular ones--and good talks where you can actually learn some things. Also, it's in a part of the country that has some nice attractions. As a bonus, there's no corporate domination at OSCON. It's a conference for us.

If you'd like to see more photographs from the conference, check out the photographs by James Duncan Davidson of O'Reilly Media. Thanks to James and Jinny for the photos.