A WEEK IN OREGON

O’Reilly’s yearly Open Source Conference attracted 2100 registrants to Portland, Oregon USA on August 1-5. This year the conference was held at a new conference center, since OSCON has outgrown previous locations. Vendors like Google, Yahoo!, and Hewlett Packard reported in presentations and keynotes on how they are using Open Source and contributing back to community projects. Many of these vendors were hiring new employees and were busily collecting resumes at the exhibition hall. Along with more traditional topics, such as Perl, Apache, MySQL/ PostgreSQL,Subversion, PHP, Java, Python, and Open Source legal business, another more unusual topic proved surprisingly popular: the programming language Ruby, especially its rapid Web development framework, Ruby on Rails, captivated many and raked in one of the $5000 Open Source awards.