Open source convention packs heavy hitters

Unlike the glittering spectacle of JavaOne and Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention hums so quietly in the catacombs of a Portland, Ore., waterfront hotel that even the hotel’s guests aren’t aware of it. Attendees drive long distances, bunk many to a room, and put their lives on hold to get here. It’s remarkable considering that, on paper, many in attendance can’t afford to be here. But they show up anyway.

Their sacrifice is changing the world in the ways the free software movement intended. I applaud the companies that made the leap from free and small to big and commercial. But open source has altered the strategies of many major players that didn’t start as open source outfits. The list of the convention’s platinum sponsors is a Who’s Who of big corporate converts to the ways of the free.

Apple grabbed my attention with a most unlikely combination of BSD Unix, Apple’s considerable glue and polish, and well-selected open source projects, all planted on a PowerPC and stuffed into a six-pound notebook. Open source was more than a catalyst for Apple; it couldn’t have opened one mainstream business’s door without it. More than a few developers got their first taste of open source’s pleasures on an iBook or an iMac. The skills they honed on humble consumer hardware carry them effortlessly, and sometimes directly, to the fire-breathing 64-bit servers and desktops that are changing the world. Apple in turn gives back to the open source movement in more direct ways, but always quietly.

Sun Microsystems has gotten some serious open source religion with its Linux-based Java Desktop System and its ever-more-open client and server Java offerings to the free community. I see a lot of potential in the lower end of Sun’s subscription programs. Some could put powerful dual-Opteron development workstations within the reach of budget-constrained developers.

Novell’s story has been all over the papers. Its recently acquired SuSE is a commercial Linux kingpin that remains loyal to the free community. The 1.0 release of Ximian’s Mono, which also flies quietly under Novell’s banner, is a milestone of genuine significance, not least because it fulfills Microsoft’s promise to make C# a public property. I’m not cynical about that in the least, and neither is Microsoft. To see Microsoft as a platinum sponsor of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention is encouraging, as is its freely downloadable Visual Studio Express set of development tools.

IBM remains a significant presence at this convention and in open source, even after toning down its boisterous “we invested $1 billion in open source” marketing campaign. IBM substantially elevated the credibility of Linux, especially with its focus on storage performance and the incredibly energizing (and now fully unencumbered) Eclipse development environment. Eclipse bugs the hell out of Sun, but it put Java on the radar of lots of developers who weren’t all that jazzed about Java.

The conference sessions here are largely focused on Apache, Linux, Perl, PHP, and Python. These are the meat and potatoes of open source development. But commercial engagement in open source, which was once regarded as threatening to the technology, tends to advance the open source philosophy: Take what you need, credit its creators, and add something of your own.