Sebastopol, CA--Registration has just opened for the 2003 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, a much-anticipated annual event for the open source community. Programmers, developers, strategists, technical staff, and other open source votaries from around the world congregate for five days of tutorials, conference sessions, and networking of the flesh-and-blood variety. Recognizing that open source tools have moved squarely into the mainstream, this year's convention focuses on "embracing and extending proprietary software." The convention takes place July 7-11 in Portland, OR, one of the most wireless cities in America.

Melding open source and commercial aspects in operating systems and applications is becoming the norm, for financial and technical reasons, making open standards for data exchange and service interoperability essential. "You can't scratch a Fortune 500 company without finding free and open source software," observes Tim O'Reilly, founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates. Some state governments are mandating that open source software be considered when making software purchases, and large-scale open source enterprise applications are multiplying. The convention's corporate sponsors--Apple, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, and Ticketmaster, among others--are another indicator of the breadth of open source technology.

"We were amazed at the number of high quality proposals we received this year," notes O'Reilly editor and convention program chair Nathan Torkington. "The committee had a difficult time paring them down to the number of slots available. But that's a good problem to have." Adds Torkington, "We've added a couple of new things to this year's program: our first-ever Hackathon, which takes place just before the convention officially begins. It should be a blast. We're also expanding on Larry Wall's State of the Onion talks, which have been a feature of the last OSCONs. We've asked well-known folks from five other technologies to tell us what's new in their worlds, so not only do we have Larry speaking about Perl, but Guido van Rossum will speak about Python, Monty Widenius about MySQL, Shane Caraveo about PHP, Theodore Ts'o about Linux, and so on."

Many other notable speakers bringing a wealth of know-how to the convention include Perl fixtures Damian Conway and Mark-Jason Dominus, IBM Eclipse director Paul Buck, Mitchell Kapor of OSAF, HP open source program director Stormy Peters, Ximian CTO Miguel de Icaza, MySQL AB co-founder and VP David Axmark, Jabber Software Foundation's Jeremie Miller, chromatic, Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, and Gurusamy Sarathy. Milton Ngan will present a sequel to last year's keynote on the making of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, focusing this year on "The Two Towers."

This year's tutorials and sessions are organized into specific tracks and conferences:

• Perl Conference 7: Perl 5, Perl 6, Parrot, and mod_perl, including useful modules, software development tips, developing for Parrot and Perl 6

• The Python 11 Conference: Python and Zope, in particular using the latest modules, software engineering, case studies

• PHP Conference 3: Unix, Windows, Apache, and beyond, plus new developments, security, case studies, large-scale applications development, best practices

• Apache: The Apache web server, including 2.0, modules, configuration, performance tuning, security, Apache XML projects, Apache Java

• XML: schemas, software, standards, best practices, web services, IP issues around standards and schemas

• Applications: system administration tools, servers, back office utilities, GUI systems, user applications, productivity tools

• MySQL and PostgreSQL: configuration, migration, data warehousing, tuning, clustering and replication, fallover, backups, efficient client-side processing and query design

• Ruby: introductions to Ruby, and power user talks for experienced Ruby programmers

The body of knowledge a programmer, systems manager, or administrator needs these days is an eclectic mix of decades-old best practices, modern innovations, and forward thinking possibilities. The fifth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention addresses these needs with well-established principles born again in new forms, the new ideas that will soon be common wisdom, and everything in between.

Additional Resources:

• Complete convention details

• For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at the convention, contact Andrew Calvo at (707) 827-7176, or andrewc@oreilly.com.

• Check out news from last year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention

• More information on open source issues

Comments about the 2002 O'Reilly Open Source Convention:

"The conference was just excellent and the community, experience, and discussions from the keynotes, with the attendees and the speakers were invaluable for me and my two collegues."
--Jonagustine Lim, eGovernment Team Specialist, State of Hawaii

"I am really looking forward to the Open Source Convention. IMHO I think it is the best event I attend every year."
--Stacey Quandt, Industry Analyst, Linux and Open Source, Giga Information Group

"...hordes of volunteer programmers who make up the open-source movement met this week for their annual convention in San Diego..."
--The Economist, July 25, 2002

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