Report on The First Annual O'Reilly European Open Source Convention

Europe has become fertile ground for open source projects and innovators. European governments are beginning to integrate FLOSS (free/libre and open source software) in innovative ways, and open source communities--particularly on the professional level--are multiplying and gaining influence across the continent. To support and further this open source momentum, O'Reilly Media held its first O'Reilly European Open Source Convention (EuroOSCON) at the Hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam on October 17-20, 2005.

Nearly 500 developers, programmers, hackers, and systems and network administrators attended tutorials, sessions, on-stage discussions, informal events, and hallway conversations focusing on almost every aspects of the open source platform. Mature technologies were explored alongside newer and less developed tools, allowing attendees to take in the full range of open source's capabilities.

Like OSCON, its US counterpart, EuroOSCON brought together diverse people, projects, and communities. Delegates heard from leaders, experts, and alpha geeks leading the open source charge throughout Europe and the world, including: Simon Phipps, Sun; Alan Cox and Michael Tiemann, Red Hat; Jason Matusow, Microsoft; Damian Conway, Monash University; Larry Wall, Perl guru; David Heinemeier-Hansson, Less Software; Cory Doctorow, EFF; Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media; Chet Kapoor, IBM; Jeff Waugh, Canonical; Paul Everitt, Zope Europe; Paula LeDieu, Creative Commons International; Marcel den Hartog, Computer Associates; Luis Casas Luengo, Extremadura; Rasmus Lerdorf, Yahoo!; Alex Martelli, Google; Autrijus Tang, open source advocate; David Axmark, MySQL AB; Ben Laurie, Apache Software Foundation; Danese Cooper, Intel; and Karoly Negyesi, Drupal. More... [Bill Fox]