The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) was an American annual convention for the discussion of

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

. It was organized by publisher

O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books, produces tech conferences, and provides an online learning platform. Its distinctive brand features a woodcut of an ...

and was held each summer, mostly in

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous co ...

, from 1999 to 2019.

History

OSCON grew out of The

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

Conference, but the amount of Perl content has continued to decline each year. The first Perl Conference took place in 1997. The first OSCON was held in 1999. ;Notable events * The

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

open source project was announced at the 2000 conference in Monterey. * The

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pl ...

open source project was launched at the 2010 conference. * OSCON has been the host to

Larry Wall Larry Arnold Wall (born September 27, 1954) is an American computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language. Personal life Wall grew up in Los Angeles and then Bremerton, Washington, before starting higher education at ...

's State of the Onion keynotes. * All O'Reilly events were cancelled in response to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

, and the company closed the in-person conference portion of their business.

Layout

Throughout the week in which OSCON is hosted, there are workshops and presentations, most of which are conducted in meeting rooms. These sessions are primarily focused on the use and development of upcoming and current open source software, and there are usually a few sessions addressing the open source community itself. In the past few years, the main topics have been

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...

virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...

, minimizing

downtime The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an u ...

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

, and

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system (I ...

. Certain sessions are sponsored by companies and are free and open to the public. During the convention, OSCON throws various parties for the attendees. Many of these are sponsored, with some parties being held at sponsoring companies' facilities throughout the city. At the OSCON expo, vendors and other organizations showcase their latest innovations, offer short classes, give away swag, and answer questions about their products. Some companies that have had larger booths over the years include

Linode Linode, LLC () is an American cloud hosting provider that focuses on providing Linux powered virtual machines to support a wide range of applications. It was acquired by Akamai Technologies on March 21, 2022. Back in 2003, at the time of its la ...

Rackspace Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United ...

, HP,

Bluehost Bluehost is a web hosting company owned by Endurance International Group. It was one of the 20 largest web hosts in 2015 and was collectively hosting over 2 million domains in 2010. Bluehost was among those studied in the analysis of web-based ...

, and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

. Tables are usually set up outside the meeting rooms where attendees can rest or work. There is also a sponsored "hack zone" outside the Expo Hall where attendees may use fast networking and power strips to

hack Hack may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Games * ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game * ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia franchise ''.hack'' Music * ''Hack'' (album), a 199 ...

, socialize, or take a break. Through the main hallway, there is usually a large black box referred to as "The Chalkboard", where attendees can use chalk to scribble logos, slogans, names, and ideas.

Locations

References

External links

* , oscon.com {{commons category, Open Source Convention Open Source Convention Free-software conferences Articles containing video clips

History

Layout

Locations

See also

References

External links