O'Reilly's OSCON, the original and perhaps best open source conference takes place in Portland Oregon July 23-27. I've been going to OSCON for a few years now, and it's a good place to see open source "in the wild." Yes, there are some VC's and a few marketing types but mostly this is a conference for open source developers and those interested in using open source and contributing. There are tracks for topics r O’Reilly’s OSCON, the original and perhaps best open source conference takes place in Portland Oregon July 23-27. I’ve been going to OSCON for a few years now, and it’s a good place to see open source “in the wild.” Yes, there are some VC’s and a few marketing types but mostly this is a conference for open source developers and those interested in using open source and contributing.There are tracks for topics ranging from web app development to databases, security and random emerging topics. In recent years, they’ve added a 1-day executive briefing session called O’Reilly Radar, which focuses on the business of open source, presumably to keep from watering down the technical focus elsewhere. It’s a good approach. They’ve done a good job tuning the conference over the years to keep it interesting. Speakers include the likes of Chris DiBona from Google, Larry Wall creator of Perl, Guido Von Rossum creator of Python, Rasmus Lerdorf creator of PHP, Matt Asay from Alfresco, Brian Aker from MySQL, Mitchell Baker from Mozilla, and many others. Don’t expect luxury food, but otherwise, there’s lots of good meaty discussion. Open Source