This past week I attended OSCon, the annual conference for open source’s
true believers. And there was a religious fervor in the air,
particularly from the point of view of someone more accustomed to
Oracle conferences.
And if open source is the religion, proprietary closed-source
companies are the devil. That having been said, I was surprised
how virtually all large companies were demonized. Even long-time
defenders of open source like IBM were ignored at best. That
didn’t prevent them from coming though, with Microsoft and HP in
particular with high-profile sponsorships and PR offensives that
didn’t seem to have much influence with the crowd.
The companies generating buzz were the small companies built
around development of their own open source products. There are a
surprising number of them out there, especially relating to
multiple forks of a popular product like MySQL or …
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