OSCON: New Sessions

Just putting the finishing touches on the OSCON program. Here are some changes, updates, and things to note.

• Harmut Pilch from FFII will be taking part in a panel on the outcome of the European patent fight.
• Killer sessions from Greasemonkey and Firefox creators. Other Mozilla content: Future of Firefox as a Platform, Mitchell baker's keynote, Asa Dotzler's keynote, Application Development with Firefox and Mozilla, Getting Started with a Mozilla Project, and the XUL Tutorial.
• Open Source Data Warehouses from O'Reilly's own data warehouse guru, Roger Magoulas.
• Building Websites with Drupal by the Drupal founder and project lead.
• LiveJournal's Backend: A History of Scaling by Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal. This got very positive reviews at the MySQL Conference and I thought it was worth bringing to OSCON.
• We have a title and description for Andrew Morton's keynote.
• Going Open Source: A Case Study from the CTO of Laszlo, the declarative markup for Flash applications. Theirs is a fascinating study of going from closed source proprietary application vendor to open source vendor.
• PostgreSQL Built Your Car. I met Aaron at Penguicon and was so blown away by his story of the company he works for that I immediately invited him to speak at OSCON.
• Dick Hardt will keynote on Identity 2.0. I saw him give this, or a variation on it, at Supernova 2005 and it was one of the few talks that woke up the audience.
• The SpikeZoo TestFest will be a fun place to hang out and learn how to integrate your application tests into the SpikeSource test suite.
• We've had to move David Heinemeier Hansson's Ruby on Rails talk to a bigger room. It's now on Wednesday at 5:20pm.
• The tutorial Everyone Hates our IT Department! has been cancelled.
• Jeremy Zawodny is keynoting on open source at Yahoo!
• We have some O'Reilly talks on writing books, hacking Safari web services, and Safari U.
• Voice is hot. We have Brad Porter talking about VoiceXML and open source voice hacking, Anthony Baxter talking about the Python VoIP system Shtoom, Brian Capouch's Understanding Asterisk tutorial, and Brian Aker talking about hacking your home phone system with Asterisk.
• Notables: Xen, ActiveGrid, ActiveGrid again, Google, calendaring, calendaring again, DTrace, DTrace again, OpenSolaris.
• Check out the SourceLabs triple play: Swik, Open testing, Open Source and Enterprise Software.
• SpikeSource has a quadruple play: Kim Polese is keynoting, Shao Fang and Glen Martin are giving a talk on Participatory Testing, and the awesome Murugan Pal is speaking on What Developers Want and Identifying Related Open Source Components for Stable Runtime.
• Optaros will be busy, too: Robert Lefkowitz (aka R0ml) is back with Calculating the ROI of Open Source, Open Data, and the continuation of his keynote from last year The Semasiology of Open Source (Part II).
• Master hackers Artur Bergman and Leon Brocard are speaking on svl, a peer-to-peer distributed repository built on top of Subversion.
• Some other sessions I'm hoping to get to: Women in Open Source, You Can't Get There From Here, The Do-It-Yourself Mindset, Open Source in Developing Countries, Computational Origami, Opening the Source to Business, FLOSS Skill Building, Perl Best Practices, Creating Passionate Users, Business for Geeks.

See you in Portland!