Open source means business

Day one of the OSB conference in Portland OR. I attended several sessions that covered various topics. The opening session was for the general conference and had some remarks from Selena Deckelmann (one of the con organizers) and then a keynote on open source and how it can be used to protect journalists.

Other sessions included "How to Give Great Tech Talks", a session on Hypercard and why we need it now, databases and the cloud, search engine optimization, and an evening BOF (birds of a feather) session on Ruby.

I think I was most impressed with the focus on business issues. A number of presentations (not all, but a significant portion) discussed the use of open source solutions to solve large-scale challenges. (Facebook and Twitter use open source, for example.) The discussion of business issues is a change from the open source conferences in 1999. Back then, presentations discussed neat technical tricks and did not talk about business issues. Perhaps it was not necessary, or even appropriate, given the low degree of adoption. Now, the market has changed, and presentations have changed too.