A Remote-Attendee’s Look at OSCON
Another year and another successful OSCON has been concluded. While I didn’t attend this year’s conference, let me hereby offer some reflections — basing it on reading blogs and talking to attendees both in person and over Twitter (I’m glad to see both the @MySQL and @MySQL_Community Twitter accounts have a large and quickly growing list of followers).
Let me start by highlighting the 2009 Google O’Reilly Open Source Awards. First on the list is Brian Aker, who is recognised as the Best Open Source Database Hacker. He joined MySQL many years ago having not just worked on Apache but also a major developer behind Slashdot. His award he gets for his contributions to MySQL in the past and Drizzle currently. Congratulations to Brian, and I’m sorry I won’t be attending Burning Man with you this year!
I also want to highlight some of the other winners. Evan Prodromou won the award for Best Social Networking Hacker and Clay Johnson who won the Best Community Builder award. Evan Prodromou wrote and runs the open-source microblogging tool Laconica which powers Identi.ca. The Laconica platform runs on MySQL as the database. The same can be said for Sunlight Labs of which Clay Johnson is the Director. Sunlight Labs produces technology to make government in the United States more transparent. Their platform also uses MySQL as a database.
Let me also grab the opportunity to congratulate Bruce Momjian, who was named Database Jedi Master for his work on PostgreSQL!
From what I sensed, highlighted topics of this years OSCON were web applications, cloud computing in addition to what could be labeled “regular applications“. In all of them, data and the web as a data driven operating system (to use Tim O’Reilly’s words from the keynote) is a self evident component, a fact of life. And MySQL continues to be one of the prime movers in this space.
July 30th, 2009 at 0:13
Maybe next year
July 30th, 2009 at 6:01
MySQL itself was weirdly absent though. After a few days at the conference I started believing that Drizzle and MariaDB really have replaced it already, and had to kick myself to remember that it isn’t true - yet.
Maybe OSCon is like the stock market? Predicts events 6 months into the future
We’ll see…