Moving OSCON to San Jose at the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area allowed many local IT professionals to attend the conference without traveling. But the current daunting economic climate with an unusually high unemployment rate prevented many potential attendees from spending US$ 2000 for the five-day-long series of tutorials and presentations. Recently, open-source projects have moved to narrowly focused, low-budget, grassroots conferences, which would explain the relatively low turnout of high-profile community leaders this year at OSCON.

Tim O'Reilly's traditional conference intro, The O'Reilly Radar, revolved around US president Obama's new "open government" directive. O'Reilly pointed out that the data.gov website contains a boatload of freely available, politically relevant data that is waiting to be fed into useful applications developed by the open source community. Apps for America 2 [1] is a program to accomplish that. O'Reilly made clear, though, that "Gov2.0" won't operate like a vending machine that runs on taxes and spits out sensible politics, but needs hands-on help by the people, and the open source community in particular.

With up to 15 parallel tracks, OSCON presented talks on a wide variety of topics, ranging from acceptable to excellent quality. With options such as legal advice on copyright or licensing issues, tutorials on a plethora of old and new Unix tools and web technology, databases, programming tips, or success stories from the trenches of the industry, finding a talk of interest was easy.

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