Update from OSCON 2010

Jul 21, 2010

What's on the show floor and what's new in the world of open source.

After the tutorial sessions that ran through Monday and Tuesday and the Ignite talks and O'Reilly awards kicked things off last night, we've settled in nicely to our booth on the show floor and have been making the rounds, enjoying the talks and meeting the other expo attendees. And while the day's not half-over quite yet, here's what we have so far in convenient bullet form.

On the mobile front:

  • Symbian will continue to develop its open architecture, despite the recent news that Nokia would be dropping the OS from future smartphones in favor of MeeGo. The Foundation has enlisted the help of Nitobi and its PhoneGap software to develop smartphone applications.
  • MeeGo discussed its AppUp store, a cloud-based app store that is currently in beta. The store will feature apps for the various deployments of MeeGo, including mobile phone, tablet, and hinted at future iterations of the OS running on televisions and mediaphones.

As for keynotes:

  • Tim O'Reilly started off hailing the open source community for its collaboration and its uncanny ability to solve problems through involving and engaging members from every corner of the earth and every place on the spectrum.
  • Jennifer Pahlka gave an impassioned call to arms for Code for America, asking that developers lend their time and skills to help bridge the rapidly growing technology gap that is overtaking municipal jobs.
  • Dirk Hohndel gave a breakdown of MeeGo and its role in upstream development.
  • Stormy Peters from GNOME asked the question "Is Your Data Free" and then quickly likened data ownership and autonomy to picking up dog poop. That was one of the more impressive linkages of the conference so far.
  • Bryan Sivak, from the government of the District of Columbia, gave a candid talk about open source and its role in government. At one point, Sivak made the statement that organizations and open source vendors needed to get real on pricing and that maintenance and support were major factors in determining how much an open source solution would cost.
  • Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, discussed the cloud and making it open, free, and profitable. Mickos's solution: Give it to people who have plenty of time and not much money, sell it to people with lots of money and no time.

And that's it for now. We're still roaming the show floor and you can expect video and transcribed interviews to come. Follow us at linux_pro on twitter and check back here for updates.

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