The Open Source Convention, or OSCON as it's more readily known, is an annual confluence of all things open source that has taken place since 1998. From its origins as an informal get together of Perl aficionados, OSCON is now regarded as the place to go for all things open source.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of OSCON, and I was fortunate enough to be a part of that history.
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Another O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) has come and gone. In many ways, OSCON is summer camp for geeks. A bunch of geeks from different parts of the world gather together each year in Portland, Ore., to learn, socialize, network, and get away from the workaday doldrums of our regular lives. Like summer vacation, it's over far too soon, but we pack a lot in just a short time.

Last month at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON), it seemed like Microsoft was everywhere you looked, avouching its interest in open source. Thanks to the company's history -- including some very recent history -- a great many in the open source community viewed the company's presence with mistrust, suspicious of Redmond's motives and apprehensive of what would follow.

OSCON 2009 has already sold out to Microsoft, as Microsoft bought itself a keynote spot

Microsoft bought a seat at OSCON. There are problems with both what they are telling us and what others might not be able to tell us because of this. A small retrospective is in order.

The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) has posted sessions and keynotes for its annual conference. Scheduled for July 19-23, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OSCON features keynotes including Google's Chris DiBona, Facebook's David Recordon, Canonical's Simon Wardley, and the GNOME Foundation's Stormy Peters.

There are two big open-source software gatherings happening over the next week, as both Ubuntu Live and O'Reilly OSCON descend upon the Oregon Convention Center in Portland (which even has a moat!).

he first two days of O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) are dominated by technical tutorials, but there are sessions that buck the trend. Monday's most interesting event was Participate 08, a panel discussion sponsored by Microsoft. Panelists debated the meaning of the buzzword "openness" as it applies to source code, services, data, and business models

OSCON 2009 is now drawing to a close, and, before we hop on a flight back to the UK, we spent an hour or two typing up just a few snippets from some of the interviews we conducted at the conference.