The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) was an American annual

convention Convention may refer to: * Convention (norm), a custom or tradition, a standard of presentation or conduct ** Treaty, an agreement in international law * Convention (meeting), meeting of a (usually large) group of individuals and/or companies in a ...

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 ...

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 populou ...

, from 1999 to 2019.

History

OSCON grew out of The

Perl Perl is a family of two High-level programming language, high-level, General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, Interpreter (computing), interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it ...

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 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 platfo ...

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 ...

State of the Onion State of the Onion is a book written by Julie Hyzy and published by Berkley Books (owned by Penguin Group) on 2 January 2008, which later went on to win the Anthony Award The Anthony Awards are literary awards for mystery writers presented a ...

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 identified ...

, 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 m ...

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

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, st ...

, 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 ...

, big data, 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 ...

. 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 Swag, SWAG, or Swagg may refer to: Terms and slang * Swag (motif) or festoon, a wreath or garland or a carving depicting foliage and ribbons ** Swag, fabric dressing for a window valance * Swag, stolen goods, in 1800s thieves cant * Swag (pro ...

, and answer questions about their products. Some companies that have had larger booths over the years include Linode,

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, and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

. 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