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Inside The OSCON 2008 Open Source Conference

We round up our coverage of the open source OSCON 2008 conference. Don't miss Q&As with Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth and The Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin. Check out the photo gallery, too.

By Serdar Yegulalp
InformationWeek
July 29, 2008 01:15 PM

Last week I left behind the muggy July of New York to drink in the relative cool of Portland, Ore. -- and to drink in a week of the open source world, courtesy of O'Reilly's OSCON.

My account of what I saw and did is below, in eight juicy blog posts, and here in photos I took at the conference.

At OSCON 2008, netbooks like these Intel Classmates were everywhere.

(click for image gallery)

OSCON, Pt. 1.1: Free-Range Open Source
The exhibitor's hall wouldn't open until the next day, so I elected to check out the "Open Mobile Exchange", a set of quick lectures from various movers and shakers in the open source mobile communications field.

OSCON, Pt. 2.1: A Few Words With Mark Shuttleworth
For many people, Ubuntu is Linux, and Mark Shuttleworth is Ubuntu. It might come as a surprise to learn that the prime mover behind one of the most successful and visible Linux distributions out there isn't entirely comfortable with that. I jumped at the chance to sit down with Mark for an hour on Tuesday morning while at OSCON and ask him about that, and many other, things.

OSCON, Pt. 2.2: Participate 08 (Sponsored By ... Microsoft?)
My Monday afternoon at OSCON 2008 was taken up by "Participate 08," a Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)-sponsored discussion panel chaired by a whole panoply of folks -- including, yes, an open source liaison from Microsoft. The whole thing was neither a "corporate apologia" (as one wag put it from the audience) nor a pile-on where Microsoft got the worst of it.