OSCON (O’Reilly Open Source Convention)
Austin, TX USA
10 May 2017
I only attended the first day of OSCON as I had to leave for OSCAL during the second day. Normally I wouldn’t attend only one day of an event, but I had been in town for two other events, Community Leadership Summit and GrimoireCon. OSCON is the O’Reilly Open Source Convention and it is held as the North America general open source conference. This was my first time at this conference and I didn’t know what to expect. I have heard it described as the North America FOSDEM. Having attended FOSDEM in the past, this is definitely not FOSDEM. There is a high level of corporate involvement and most firms are their representing themselves and their open source projects. It is clear that there is a desire to recruit customers and employees with large numbers of the attendees seeming to be job seekers.
Fedora showed off the modularity and raspberry pi demos we used at Red Hat Summit. Adam Samalik was present as our Modularity expert as he was already in the US for Red Hat Summit. There was interest in both demos, however, Modularity seemed to be the more attractive to attendees. We were in the Red Hat Community booth and shared demo space with OpenShift. The combination of a container run time with the Fedora messaging was well received.
I encourage you to read other reports about OSCON as my time at the conference was limited. I did not have a pass that allowed me to access the sessions so I can’t report on them. I spent quite a bit of time talking with partners on the trade show floor which caused me to be out of the booth for large parts of the day. These conversations were really good and I believe that Fedora can be a first class target for open source developers in many areas.
By sharing a booth with Red Hat we had no direct conference costs. Even the stickers we handed out were provided directly by Red Hat. This allowed us to participate in this conference without spending any Fedora public budget.
