Urias at the Dell booth during OpenSource World.

It's been about a month since Urias, Scott and myself represented Haiku at the O'Reilly OSCON 2009 conference in San Jose, and approximately two weeks since we exhibited at the OpenSource World 2009 conference in San Francisco. I think this is the first time that we exhibit at not one but two events in a row, and we don't write any reports; and that is a real shame. So here I am, after some very serious procrastination, finally attempting to give a recount of both events in a single blog post. Like we say in Argentina, better late than never... :)

OSCON 2009: Way Beyond Expectations

OSCON is an open source event organized by O'Reilly, a well-known company whose core business is to foster technological innovation by publishing books, holding conferences and providing online services. I had never been to OSCON before, so I did do some reading about it prior to applying for a booth earlier this year; beyond all the usual stuff (history, demographics, etc.) that I could find on their websites, what caught my eye was a statement about this year's OSCON, which I quote: "If the first ten years of OSCON were about opening the minds of big business to the philosophy of open source, are the next ten years about opening the minds of the open source community to the possibilities of its future?". Quite interesting articulation indeed, I thought, and one that raised my expectations for the event to a motivational level. I can say now that, luckily, those expectations were not only met, but even surpassed: OSCON 2009 was a real blast, the kind that you don't ever want to miss again.

After I didn't write the promised report on the last Coding Sprint which took place after BeGeistert in April, I am now trying not build up an even bigger lag. Last week, Axel and his girlfriend Claudia hosted Michael, Ingo and myself at their nice home in Hannover, Germany. Oliver could sadly not attend our small, relatively spontaneous and informal Coding Sprint due to sickness, although he seemed to be with us in spirit considering all his ICU commits. (The ICU libraries are an important foundation of the forthcomming Haiku Locale Kit.)