OSAlert is a sponsor of this year’s O’Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSAlert reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We’ll pick a winner at random next week. If you don’t have an OSAlert account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you’d like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSAlert readers is “OSN.”We are also receiving a three-day pass for an OSAlert contributor. If you have written anything for OSAlert in the past, or would be willing to commit to providing coverage of the OSCON event, please contact us and tell us why you should be OSAlert’ reporter on the OSCON beat. We’ll try to pick a contributor by the first week of June or so. Your selection would only include a conference pass; no travel expenses.
If there was only 1 OS in the world and that OS limited you to a boring immutable taskbar. It would be umm, boring? Does that count as a comment?
http://i.imgur.com/fsjxjBI.png
^^ Work in progress since 5 years and probably for the next few years too
Retina MacBook Pro with Gentoo, URXVT, KCalc, ZSH and AwesomeWM. Scale the image down
Edited 2013-05-16 05:47 UTC
If it wasn’t for Free Software I would not be in IT at all: I liked computers of the DOS era, but mostly gave them up around the time Windows ME came out.
Linux brought back the spark and open source has defined my career in IT since day 1 in college.
Moron. Of course there would be IT.
First of all, always act like civilized person, don’t swear without need.
Second. IT would still exist, but based on what He said, He wouldn’t be part of it. Does it’s true? No one knows. My advice? At least try to read comments, that you answer to.
Stupid is who stupid does, as Forrest would say. Stupid in this case not understanding that he said that he wouldn^aEURTMt be in IT if it wasn’t for OSS. He didn’t say there wouldn^aEURTMt be IT without OSS.
I think the success of Open Source is due to a sort of benevolent selfishness. There aren’t too many situations where scratching your own itch succeeds in scratching other people’s itches with no extra cost.
So yeah. Portland is lovely. I’d go there again for sure.
I would very much love to attend OSCON in Portland. After all, Portland is not only home to the Jesus of Linux (Linus) but also the Church of Elvis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hour_Church_of_Elvis
Where better to hang-out with developers than Port-land?
Sorry, church of Elvis closed recently.
I’m in pdx, so that’d sure be convenient.
I know I come down hard on open source here (and even more so the open source fanboys). I find the attitude of parts of the community to be like oil on water; they’re so smug in their superiority that they’ll never realize just how many users they’ve driven away. There are some incredible open source projects however that I rely upon (OpenBSD, Chromium, Firefox, and NVDA just to name a few). Open source software is valuable and an excellent and much needed addition to all software development methodologies and philosophies. I just wish some of the individuals behind it would recognize that there’s room for commercial development as well and, in fact, commercial and closed is sometimes the only viable way to go when you have investors behind a project who expect to see a large return in a short time.
Does this count as a comment? I bet it does.
Seriously though, ora.com has done a lot for the open source movement in the past. I recall when their books were the stuff of legend. Indeed when I glance at my old Unix Power Tools book on the shelf it brings back memories of excitement about OSs.
Wow, I see on the oscon site those passes are not cheap. Ouch. I wonder what the sponsors do then, just give talks?
I’d love to go back to Oregon again.
I’ve heard great stories from friends who’ve attended OSCON in the past. It sounds like an amazing experience.
I love open source because I hate price gouging and market manipulation that is often done by the big companies.
It was in 2007 that I had deep serious thought about what I wanted to use as a personal computer operating system.
At that point, I had been using Linux exclusively for some time. I had a big plan to buy my first Apple computer, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I love Linux.
When I started using Linux, it was because I hated Microsoft Windows (Windows 98). In 2007, I realized that was no longer the case. I now use Linux by choice. If I had a choice to use any operating system, I would choose Linux.
Even so, I have Haiku installed and am active in the Haiku user community. I look forward to the day when Haiku can be used as my primary desktop operating system.
is a new episode of OSAlert podcast.
It can be easily recorded using Open Source Software called Audacity. You can even do it live, during OSCON.
Sadly, I’m unable to attend this CON.
I wonder whether OSCON stands for operating system convention or open source convention. Either way, I’d love to go!
Its open source. O’reilly has been writing books with an open source focus for a long time and they do oscon.
Too many excellent OS projects to rave about and many, many more to learn about at OSCon!
OSCON has been great, last year was very boring. Hope for resurrection this year.
I’d love to go to one of these conferences some time. I looked up 2 way travel prices from NY to Portland, about $700. After dining and accommodations I’m probably looking at $1400… cannot justify it even with free passes.
Why not pony up for an all inclusive trip next year
Sounds like a lot of fun. My company uses a bit of open source software here and there, but it could stand to use a lot more. Maybe I could learn a few things and pass it on…
Here’s me saying, “something about Open Source Software or OSCON.”
Or, is that a little too literal of an interpretation?
In the 10 years I’ve been working here, we’ve gone from a strictly Novell+Windows shop, to using FreeBSD for firewalls, to Debian Linux for file servers, to Ubuntu on every student/teacher desktop, to having fewer than 300 Windows licenses in the entire district.
We may not be creating a generation of OSS programmers (very little programming done on the Linux stations), but we are at least introducing every student to OSS everyday!
Edited 2013-05-16 17:32 UTC
What ever happened to that guy Kroc who used to write articles here, and he did the podcast with Thom?
Yes, this is about off-topic as it gets.
http://forum.camendesign.com
Kroc was becoming overwhelmed with his freelance work, so scaled his OSAlert participation way back.
For as much of a personal interest that I take, I feel that my relationship with open source has been made tenuous by the hard truths of my professional and academic careers.
At work, I provide support for and develop solutions on Microsoft SharePoint. *raises shield* I’m chained to Internet Explorer, I’m dependent on OneNote, and I carry around a laptop running Windows 7. At school, I complete assignments that require the use of Visio and view class notes saved as .pptx files. And then I come home to a laptop running Arch Linux, spectrwm for a window manager, Conkeror for a web browser, and urxvt for a terminal. Heck, I don’t even have any closed source games installed.
You know those people whose passion is sailing and their pipe dream is to leave everything behind and sail around the world forever? I guess that’s my dream, too.
Free as in freedom, and now maybe free as in free trip to Portland.
*Disclaimer: Selection of this post is not random.
OSCon always have a very interesting and broad program showing the how competitive and vibrant open source and its community is.
I love to go but cannot afford both registration fee and travel from Sweden.
… proprietary software on its toes.
At it’s base level, Open Source as an undirected entity is similar to pure scientific research. Just as with pure scientific research, it isn’t always clear where it will lead; sometimes theory never quite lives up to reality, sometimes it’s ignored, sometimes it’s practical application is unclear. Just like pure undirected scientific research, there’s always someone who will say “Why bother?”, but there’s always someone who will do it anyway because they understand why.
PS: Don’t bother, I detest flying. I just couldn’t resist…
As a game developer and OSS lover i live in a world of conflict. The fight between publisher imposed DRM, proprietary operating systems and some of the greatest open libraries and operating systems, makes life confusing. Either way, i’d love to be at OSCON!
I love using open source software that allows me to actually make the needed tweaks that commercial software locks me out of. In the world of shrinking budgets, a lot of times the open source is our only option, and for a lot of applications it actually works better.
So happy OSCON is in Portland, just wish my company wasn’t so cheap and would pony up the bucks to send me. Would love to go, already have the week off for OBF.
I make my living using open source software. I think I’m really lucky.
Today, I have a living thanks to Free and Open Source Software. When I was younger my family didn’t have a lot of money, but I was able to install a Linux distro on an old computer that was donated. I started learning all about programming with python and gcc before attending college. During college, Apache, PHP and MySQL helped me develop my website programming skills faster than anyone else. I became the “goto” person when people had technical problems at my Linux User Group. I landed my first programming job thanks to my skills acquired by messing around with servers, programming languages, different projects, and trying out different distros. Today, i’m proud to say that I have a job as a professional programmer on an open source project. Nothing would be more rewarding than having a chance to attend OSCON.
Edited 2013-05-16 22:13 UTC
OSCON looks like it has some fantastic talks. I really appreciate OSAlert giving someone the chance to go, even if it isn’t me.
Open Source is a great social experiment. Sometimes the project itself is not the fascinating part of it – it is the personalities that are in them.
The diversity and range of personalities can be quite interesting. You see a whole gamut of self-proclaimed experts, self-grandizing prop-my-failing-ego-and-sense-of-self dimwits, the psychotic, the neurotic, the know-it-alls to the people whose minds function as true scientists, researchers, and tinkerers who truly want to make cool stuff and share it.
I’ve been coming here for ages man, but I’m not really the type to comment, something about opening you mouth and erasing any doubt.
In any-case, There’s no way I can pass up a chance to maybe go to OS Con; if you hook me up now, I will pay you back when I’n rich* from Open Source Software.
*You will never be paid back, no one gets rich from open source.
This would be great. Local OSCON for me. I have always appreciated open source and what it can provide for those who are not monetarily rich.
Edited 2013-05-18 01:44 UTC
My first exposure to Opensource software was in 2003 when a friend lent me a Debian live CD (around 3.0 release, I think). Since then I’ve slowly drifted from being just a user into greater aspirations of contributory coding. I’m currently a CS student in PDX, but have had the privilege of apprenticing under someone utilizing Opensource technologies such as Python and CouchDB to implement a Geo based web app (satellite-layer map tiles integration). Around the same time I began the internship, I bought an expo pass for OScon2012 and received some of the greatest inspiration I’ve ever had. Being a relatively poor student, I was no financial shape to buy a full conference pass then, and though I only got a taste through hearsay in the expo hall and descriptions on the mobile app, I know that the talks themselves are priceless and among some of the best places to be for networking in the whole of this field. I am still in no financial shape to buy a pass, but can only hope that I might get picked at random to attend what I know would be fuel for some of the greatest ambitions of my career. Thanks for the chance!
Without FOSS, I don’t think that I would be in tech at all. The freedom to do whatever you want with technology that you legally obtain is one of the greatest freedoms of man. It would be amazing to go to OSCon and learn all kinds of cool stuff.
I think OSCON is too far away. Now that I’ve said that in a comment, I’m eligible to win. :O
According to the registration page, passes can be canceled for refund or transferred though, so I’m okay with that.
Will be in Portland for Phonegap day would love to extend the trip to OSCON!