Next week is OSCON. As this conference celebrates its 10th anniversary, there are a lot of cool happenings at and around the conference. I’ve been partipating at OSCON now for over 5 years and it has always been the hub of foss geeks from all parts of the US and beyond. It has changed its character a bit but not much. The hallway conversations, great talks, BOFs, awards, parties and the sheer number of geeks, geek-herders and wanna-be geeks (from companies who can’t avoid open source anymore) make the OSCON experience pretty exciting. This year promises to be fun again with co-located events such as OSCamp, an unconference from the 23rd to 25th occuring simultaneously at OSCON.

I’ll be part of a panel discussion termed “Open Source, Open World” and will be presenting a perspective on open source in India and its impact on India’s IT ecosystem. My fellow speakers will be Nnenna Nwakanme of FOSSFA Africa, Li Gong of Mozilla China, Bruno Souza of JUG, Brazil, Harshad Gune of GNUnify, India, Martin Michlmayr of HP, Europe and Rishab Ghosh of UNU-MERIT, Europe. The world will speak through these panelists and it should be very interesting to learn what open source has done to transform the world in the past 10 years. Danese Cooper will be moderator.

It has also been 10 years since the term “open source” was coined and the OSI was formed. The open source community will be gathering at OSCON to celebrate these anniversaries. I look forward to the next 10 years of open source going strong and changing the landscape of software development in many more ways.

See you there!