About OSCON

Experience OSCON | Why Attend | Who Should Attend | OSCON Kudos

Since 1998, OSCON brings together visionaries, and hackers in the trenches to explore all that open source has to offer.

If the first ten years of OSCON were about opening the minds of big business to the philosophy of open source, are the next ten years about opening the minds of the open source community to the possibilities of its future? As the pace of technological innovation accelerates, OSCON provides a central place to gain exposure to and evaluate the new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software, and standards sweeping through the open source community. As open source becomes fully integrated into the corporate environment, OSCON helps to define, maintain, and extend the identity of what it means to be open source.

OSCON focuses on the substance of technology, not the shadow, filtering the information that most merits attention and preparing participants for curves and challenges in the coming year and beyond. OSCON is the place to be inspired and challenged, renew bonds to community, make new connections, and find ways to give back to the open source movement. OSCON has also become one of the most important places to make open source related announcements, and to unveil projects and products.

Open source is a fundamental principle at the core of many established and emerging technologies, driving the future of the computer industry. OSCON explores the open source technologies that are here to stay, what will broaden the foundation, and what will lead the way to unexpected places and innovations.

"With the deepening of the credit crisis, melt down in the financial industry, the IT budgets in the big companies is under squeeze. [...] Open source software and solutions have a great opportunity to survive and benefit in this economy as they provide better returns for the companies that are looking to save huge licensing costs and greater availability of solutions and software that can be easily adopted."
- Manjunatha Kutarahalli

Experience OSCON

OSCON has become a key meeting ground to see the jewels of open source on display. Through hundreds of sessions, tutorials, activities, and events, the eleventh annual OSCON will bring you open source's best:

• Hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of open source languages and platforms
• Practical tutorials that go deep into technical skills, new features and applications, and best practices
• Inspirational keynote presentations charting the evolution of open source and beyond
• Quality time with over 3,000 fellow open source developers, hackers, experts, and users of all levels
• An Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest tools, projects, services, and products
• A vibrant "hallway track" for attendees, speakers, journalists, and vendors to debate and discuss important issues
• OSCamp, an "unconference" open to all, where the program is created on the spot by the participants
• Fun evening events and receptions, Birds of a Feather sessions, awards ceremonies, late night parties, OSCON activities, and plenty of networking opportunities to create new connections

Why Attend?

No matter the economic climate, a strong technology foundation is the key for moving your business and projects forward. In just five information-packed days (and nights) OSCON gives you the tools you need to succeed by:

• Offering actionable techniques for elegant, quality coding
• Empowering you to migrate from expensive commercial installations
• Exploring innovations in system and network administration that are ready for you to integrate immediately to increase efficiency
• Presenting essential techniques and advanced tips to keep your system scaled and optimized for trouble-free, time-saving performance
• Teaching you how to maximize productivity, increase ease of use, and lower the cost of deployment, from databases to cloud computing
• Exposing you to the most promising projects and people to give you first mover advantage in analyzing new tools and software
• Highlighting ahead-of-the-curve open telephony and mobile technologies
• Offering hype-free guidance to give your business a solid footing for success

Who Should Attend

OSCON welcomes everyone passionate about open source:

• Developers and programmers
• Designers
• Sys admins
• Hackers and geeks
• Enterprise developers and managers
• IT managers and CxOs
• Entrepreneurs
• Activists
• Trainers and educators

Past O'Reilly Open Source Conventions brought together representatives from companies and organizations like:

ACS Inc., Adobe Systems, ADP, Alfresco, Amazon, Boeing, Christian Science Monitor, Cingular Wireless, City of Portland, craigslist, CSCI, Dell, Duke University, Federal Reserve Board, General Electric, Jobster, Kansas State University, Knova Software, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Lexis Nexis, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Los Alamos National Lab, Lund University Libraries, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Motosport, Mozilla, MySQL AB, Napster, Novell, Omni Hotels, Otsuka USA, Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, PalmSource, Pentaho, Plaxo, Red Bean Software, Ruby Central Samsung, EW Scripps Company, U.S. Probation Office and Pretrial Services, University of Alaska, Verizon, WhitePages.com Inc., Xerox, and Zimbra

Past OSCON Sponsors, Exhibitors, and Media Partners have included:

ACM Queue, ActiveState, Advanced Micro Devices, Autodesk, Inc., Conference Guru, Covalent Technologies, Dell Inc., DevtownStation.com, Dr. Dobb's Journal, Enterprise Open Source Journal, Google, Greenplum, Griffin Technology, HP, Hyperic, IBM, Intel Corporation, IPTV Industry, Laszlo Systems Linux Journal, LinuxQuestions.org, Linux Pro Magazine, MacMinute.com, Methods & Tools, MindTouch, mixi.jp, Oracle, Port 25, Powell's Books, Roundabout Five, SDForum, Shopzilla, Six Apart Ltd., Solid, Sun Microsystems, Sys Admin, Technology Review, Inc., TechTracker, The 451 Group, The Open Technology Business Center (OTBC), The Women's Technology Cluster, Ticketmaster, Timbuk2 Designs Inc., VoIP-News.com, WiMAX Industry, Yahoo! Inc., and Zend Technologies, Inc.

OSCON Kudos

"I personally found the Velocity summit one of the most practical conferences I attended all year. I took home a number of ideas that translated into improving performance on the Netflix site. One thing that really made the difference was all of the speakers were experienced practitioners. The other great thing was the abundance of short talks. By having more speakers the information was served up in a nice condensed manner." —Bill Scott, Netflix, co-author of Designing Web Interfaces

"I feel Velocity Conference really serves a need in the community to bring folks with like goals together to learn from one another. The quality of the content in each presentation was really outstanding...Velocity 2009 was a great experience, and I look forward to next year’s event!" —ServerUnderground

"Overall, the Velocity conference was a great way to get up to speed on the latest in web performance issues. I’m looking forward to next year!" —Web Performance, Inc.

"Velocity is the best conf for web engineers I've been to so far. Solid talks and invaluable info. Worth every penny!" —Ismail Elshareef, , via Twitter

"I can say without hyperbole that this was the best conference I’ve attended. The presentations were from people doing real large-scale web development and included a fair amount of real data and some of their solutions to hard problems." —robcee

"Velocity fills a very important hole in the art of building great on-line services: a focus on performance that no other conference can match. The 2009 Velocity conference looks to be the best yet, with sessions that cover all layers of the web application stack." —Jeremy Zawodny, Craigslist.

"I educated hundreds of people here at Time Inc., after the [Velocity] conference. The knowledge I gained and passed to others, impacted the way our business clients perceive their sites as successful. Of course, I'll send the endorsement for Velocity 2009!" —Alla Gringaus, Time, Inc.

"...an eye opener in terms of improving and maintaining performance on very large web sites." —Mike Brunt, Musings from a ColdFusion Aficionado

"Velocity is the conference I always wanted. Instead of focusing on one particular product or technology, it focuses on the true problem of keeping websites fast and available, which a lot of us have to deal with" —Peter Zaitsev, CEO Percona Inc., co-author of High Performance MySQL

"I was an attendee and speaker at Velocity 2008, and was quite impressed. More than 600 people attended, and the folks I met ran the gamut from those wanting to learn from the experts, to the experts themselves. Velocity 2009 promises even more. This year it's a day longer, providing for more sessions and greater depth. There's not a better place to meet your peers in the Web Performance and Operations community." —Eric Goldsmith, AOL.

"Velocity 2008 was an event that gathered together top performance experts from companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Mozilla, AOL, Microsoft, Netflix and the developers of tools and applications like HTTPWatch, Fiddler, Firebug, and, of course, Firefox and IE. It was a great learning and networking experience and I'm looking forward to more of the same in 2009!" —Stoyan Stefanov, Yahoo!.

The Velocity conference is the best ops focused event I've been to, the content was highly technical and not just teaser." —Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Engine Yard.

"O'Reilly's Velocity conference is the intersection of a Venn diagram for web services and operations, and it demonstrates that both are getting more interesting as they gain in importance. If you're looking for the best topics and experts in these spaces or their confluence, this is the conference for you." —Luke Kanies, Reductive Labs, Creator of 'Puppet'

"Velocity '08 was the first conference dedicated to Internet and Web operators. I was extremely impressed by the technical depth of the tracks, presenters, and attendees. Velocity is now one of my three 'must go' yearly events even though it is only in its second year of operation. I'm very excited for this year's event and look forward to further engaging With other web scale players." —Randy Bias, GoGrid.

"Performance is one of the difficult frontiers that web developers must push against. Velocity is a good forum for exchanging sightings and explorations." —Douglas Crockford, Yahoo!, Author of JavaScript: The Good Parts

"The knowledge and contacts I picked up at Velocity 2008 have been of tremendous value throughout the year. Most interesting were the talks that had never-before printed information about internal performance characteristics of Internet Explorer. I can't wait for another dose from Velocity 2009." —Tony Gentilcore, Software Engineer, Google, Creator of 'Fasterfox'

"Velocity is the conference where people talk about how to get things done in the real world - if you want to know how the best in the world handle their Operations, Velocity is the place to learn." —Adam Jacob, Opscode

"Velocity 2008 was a unique opportunity to access the latest and the best in techniques and strategies to help improve website performance. The knowledge we gained from the experience has gone a long way already to improve the quality of customer experience on our ever faster website. Having said that, I don't mind our website becoming even faster, and I look forward to Velocity 2009 to learn about how we could further our performance gains." —Ian Lee, Systems Performance Manager.

Hear what attendees and exhibitors had to say about their experiences at a past OSCON.

Program Chairs

Allison Randal
has developed everything from games, linguistic analysis tools, and e-commerce sites, to shipping fulfillment, compilers, and database replication systems, has worked as a language designer, project manager, author, editor, publisher, consultant, and president of an open source software foundation. She's currently architect and lead developer of Parrot, chairman of the Parrot Foundation, and on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation.

Edd Dumbill
has been messing around with computers for years. He's currently building Expectnation, a web-based conference management system. Edd has been part of various free software projects, including GNOME and Debian, and writes about open source and open standards. He's also chair of the European XTech web technology conference.