Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 14:28:50 -0700 (PDT)
From: Carmel Noah <cammie@oreilly.com>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: O'Reilly Convention Surmounts Expectations


THE O'REILLY OPEN SOURCE CONVENTION AND PERL CONFERENCE 4.0

The O'Reilly Open Source Convention and Perl Conference provided ample
evidence that the open source momentum continues to build. Over a
four-day period, more than 1900 developers from 34 countries attended
intense, highly technical tutorials and conference sessions, plus
self-organized BOFs (Birds of a Feather sessions). The conference
focused on Perl, Linux, Apache, Python, Open Source Business
Strategies, Mozilla, BSD, PHP, sendmail and other "bleeding edge"
technologies like Zope and Jabber.

As summarized by Joseph McIntyre, O'Reilly's Director of Conferences, 
"What was unique about this conference is that we bring together a wide
spectrum of those in the open source community, and as a result
unexpected, fortuitous opportunities for new developments seem to
happen." It was all about "people meeting, disputing, poring over
problems together," noted CEO Tim O'Reilly.

Conference highlights included Perl creator Larry Wall's announcement
of Perl 6, a complete rewrite of Perl that will be released in 18 to 24
months. Other news on site included the Sun Microsystems, Inc.
announcement that it will release the source code of its StarOffice[tm]
Suite, a leading, high quality, office productivity application
software suite, to the open source community under the GNU General
Public License (GPL). Sun also announced that the OpenOffice.org site
will be created and managed by Collab.Net and will serve as the
coordination point for the source code, the definition of XML-based
file formats, and the definition of language-independent office
application programming interfaces (APIs).

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) presented the first annual
Appaloosa awards to recognize significant contributions to the
Foundation's open source projects and goals. Ryan Bloom (Apache 2.0)
and Roy Fielding (ASF chair) received the award for Vision; Lars
Eilebrecht and the Apache XML Project received the Evangelism award,
and Doug MacEachern (mod_perl) and the PHP group (mod_php) received the
award for Technical Contribution.

The Perl community also recognized its unsung heros with the White
Camel awards. Elaine Ashton, Nat Torkington and Adam Turoff were each
the recipients of $3,000 checks awarded by the Perl Mongers, and
sponsored by MindSource, O'Reilly & Associates, Collab.net and
Stonehenge Consulting Services.

O'Reilly presented $1000 awards for the best technical presentations at
the Conference. Winners were Bradley Kuhn (perljym) Best Technical
Paper; Nathan Bailey and Andrew Bromage (my.university) Best Web
Application; Damian Conway, (Text::AutoFormat) Larry Wall Award for
Practical Ingenuity; and Andy Wardley (Template Toolkit), Best New
Module.

O'Reilly editor in chief Frank Willison (http://www.oreilly.com/frank/)
and author/editor Robert Eckstein
(http://www.oreilly.com/news/osconf00_day3.html) both filed
dispatches.

For a detailed listing of announcements and news from the Open Source
Convention, see:
http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon2000/announce/index.html.