You show me mine, I'll expo you yours, OSCON

By David Stewart (Intel) (177 posts) on July 23, 2009 at 1:50 pm

Why do I love the show floor at conferences? It's almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation with the poor folks doing booth duty. Often this is because they might not be working in the area that you are interested in, or the noise level is just too high to have a good talk.

Sadly, I am addicted to technology, and the show floor is a great place for a quick fix.

OSCON is the Open Source Convention put on by O'Reilly Media and is being held in the San Jose Convention Center. As with any good-sized convention, the big hitters in the technology business are present...

  • Microsoft - OK, these guys seem unusual to be present in an open source setting, but they want to highlight the tools they have created for hosting open source projects. Their booth seems mostly an excuse for people to play Guitar Hero.
  • Sun - as the company which has contributed the most lines of open source code, it's not surprising to see them with a strong presence.

    Again, their booth was more a lounge rather than a place to have technology demos and talks. They did have a great supply of giveaways./li>

  • Amazon - had a smaller booth, and the focus seems mostly on code. They posted a code snippet and a contest for solving a problem with it.
  • Google - Also a very code focused booth. They were talking a lot about code.google.com, their Soureforge competitor.
  • Facebook - Although I'm sure that any of the companies at OSCOn would love to hire really killer technical talent. And certainly there is good talent there. But the Facebook booth seemed to be totally focused on recruiting people. A little obvious, I guess.
  • Intel - as is usually the case, Intel's booth was crammed with technology demos, booth talks and an amazing give-away. I'm not sure which of these created the long lines in the booth, but it was pretty full whenever I came by.

The demos showed a good split between hardware geek stuff and software partners.

  • OpenSolaris on Xeon, particularly showing great tools like PowerTop, which now has a pretty gtk interface.
  • SuSE running on a Xeon 5500 (formerly Nehalem) server. They were showing an Oracle database, and the tools available for the administrator here.
  • Moblin, running on Netbooks, Moble Internet Devices and automobiles. This last was really cool - there was a functional open source dialer which successfully called my cell phone!

Because O'Reilly is a media company, there are some booths which don't usually fit in the usual technology conference - publishing companies:

  • No Starch Press- I love the useful technology titles these guys have, and I really love the art work these guys have on their book covers, in particular a robot pouring coffee into the open door in its head.
  • Manning - don't know as much about these guys, they seem to have good titles.
  • Linux Pro Magazine
  • O'Reilly - hosted a lounge and a very nice book store.

And being an open source conference, there is a selection of what I would call "advocacy" booths: Electronic Fronteir Foundation, Free Software Foundation, the ACLU and FOSSFA which is the Free and Open Source Software for Africa group.

I also usually see one or two things that I learn about. One of these was Schooner. These guys are providing engines with Intel Xeon 5500 series processors (formerly Nehalem) and Intel Solid State Disks or SSDs and their optimized version of Linux, memcached and MySQL. What is really cool about this is that they didn't just put together some great Intel hardware and push the box out. They have added a bunch of value by optimizing the open source software. As a result, they get fantastic performance improvements.

What was also very cool was to see that Schooner's VP of Engineering is Dave Rodgers, who was the VP of engineering at Sequent Computer Systems when I joined them in the 80s. So it was really cool to see Dave and catch up with him.

It's a cool thing to see the various corporate tribes with their logo-ed T-Shirts herding together and mingling in the various lounges.

Categories: Open Source
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Comments (2)

July 23, 2009 4:35 PM PDT


Danielle Morrill		 Thanks for the run down and reminding us to check out the booths other than our own. It would be great to have you stop by before things wind down for the day, most of team is here including some founders!

All the best,
Danielle & Team Twilio
July 24, 2009 7:08 AM PDT


Glynn		 You missed out detailing the cool maker/hacker area - soldering irons and all sorts of fun stuff with Arduino! Nice to see you at OSCON!

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