OSCON 2008

O'Reilly's yearly open source conference, OSCON, held in Portland, Oregon, attracted more than 3,000 attendees between July 21 and 25. A variety of talks covered topics such as real-life stories on the adoption of open source tools in major corporations, open source community tips, security, Perl, Python, Ruby, open source databases, and legal issues. Into the mix came a variety of "lightning talks," in which representatives for both established and new projects had the opportunity to present themselves or give a status update within five minutes to fairly large audiences with high tolerance levels.

In his keynote address, Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth emphasized that building applications for extensions is key, and he pointed to addons.mozilla.org as a poster child implementation of this concept. In an effort to catch up with Apple's artsy OS X desktop, Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu will invest in beautifying Gnome until it will look just as slick or downright "blow past Apple" in terms of eye candy. He pointed out that innovation functions particularly well when pursued along with sound economics, which is what Ubuntu accomplishes with Shuttleworth's company Canonical.

Awards

In the long tradition of giving out US$ 5,000 prizes to the most outstanding open source heroes, the Google Open Source awards went to Andrew Tridgell of rsync and Samba fame, Harald Welte as the defender of GPL rights, Drupal's Angela Byron as best contributor, Firefox's Chris Messina as best community amplifier, and Moodle's Martin Dougiamas as the best education enabler.

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