OSCON 2010 Redux

Another OSCON is done. As usual, it was a great mix of folks and ideas across many different areas of OpenSource technology.

The most valuable track at these conferences (for me, at least) has become the hallway track. This is due in-part to my becoming a big-headed know-it-all; you pick up a lot of knowledge after you been to a good number of these conferences/conventions. But it is really important to me to be able to converse with fellow OpenSourcerors, whether they are working on the tools that I use on a daily basis or are working on something outside of my familiar tool box.

I like to think of OSCON as a melting pot for OpenSource; an excellent opportunity for cross-pollination between projects.

A particularly interesting development at OSCON this year was the announcement of a new Distributed Version Control System, under the Apache License (v2); it is called Veracity and is the product of SourceGear, LLC. This is interesting for me for a couple of reasons; the first is the license (wouldn't it be cool to embed DVCS to keep track of configuration information?), and the second is the feature set; they provide everything from source control through to distributed issue tracking. Veracity isn't done yet, but I'll be keeping an eye on it.

I'm also pleased to have shared Gimli at OSCON. Gimli is a crash tracing and analysis framework that provides watchdog and tracing support for Linux, Solaris and Darwin (OS/X) systems. You can find my slides on slideshare and find the Gimli project on bitbucket.

It was great to be at OSCON this year, especially with it being back in Portland, and I look forward to returning next year.