Black Duck Blog

Peter Vescuso begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
I just returned from the O’Reilly OSCON 2009 Conference in San Jose, California and thought it worth sharing some of what happened there.

For those that may not be familiar with OSCON, it is an annual conference run by O’Reilly Media to provide participants with exposure to and opportunity to evaluate the new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software, and standards in the open source community. OSCON focuses on technology and has become one of the most important places to make open source related announcements, and to unveil projects and products.  This year was no different.

In Tim O’Reilly’s keynote he talked about “the internet operating system” (aka Web 2.0) and the “collaboration of services” that are delivering next gen app’s. The mobile industry is leading the charge with open source and network-based services, so not a surprise that the example O’Reilly gave was a talk-to-dial phone app.  The specific example: if you’re looking for a pizza restaurant, you can speak “Pizza” into a mobile phone and the app automatically figures out what pizza places are near your current location.  It combines speech recognition and location based services in the cloud with intelligent search to provide new levels of functionality/innovation. The Internet, and mobile network become a data operating system.

O’Reilly also announced “Open Source for America” (OSfA) a new coalition of 50 companies formed in the US that will promote the use of open source to improve government. Black Duck is one of the founding members of OSfA: http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2009-07-22 Although this is an initiative focused on the US Federal Government, it will help promote the adoption of open source more generally. To put the announcement into context, consider that President Obama issued a memorandum the day after he was sworn into office calling for transparency and openness in the US government.  My impression is conference participants felt this is a unique inflection point in time to change how the US government works both in terms of efficiency and openness – it has 1300 different agencies, 3 million employees and a $71B IT budget.  There’s lots of room for improvement and one imagines mobile access will be an important part of these initiatives.