Press Release: July 20, 1998
O'REILLY HOSTS OPEN SOURCE TOWN MEETING "Open Source is Open for Business" is Theme of Public Forum
SEBASTOPOL, CA--The burgeoning open source (TM) software community will gather at the first Open Source Town Meeting on Friday, August 21 from 5:00-6:30 pm at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA. O'Reilly & Associates is sponsoring the Town Meeting, which caps off their Open Source Developer Day. More information and registration is at http://opensource.oreilly.com/townmeet.html. Admission is $10. O'Reilly will donate all proceeds from the Open Source Town Meeting to the Free Software Foundation.The Open Source Town Meeting is for software developers, corporate IS managers, entrepreneurs, and others who want to take advantage of the open source development and business models. A panel discussion on the topic "Open Source is Open for Business" will kick off the Town Meeting. Moderator Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly & Associates, will be joined by key open source leaders including:
- Larry Wall, creator of Perl and Senior Developer, O'Reilly & Associates
- James Barry, HTTP and WebSphere product manager, IBM
- Jim Hamerly, Vice President, Client Products Division, Netscape Communications Corp.
- David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo
- Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project
- Bob Young, President, Red Hat Software
- Brian Behlendorf, a founder of the Apache group and vice president of Web Applications at C2Net Software, Inc.
- John Ousterhout, CEO, Scriptics Corp. and creator of the popular Tcl scripting language
- Jordan Hubbard, a founder of the FreeBSD project
- Pamela Samuelson, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management and Systems and the School of Law; co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology
- Eric Raymond, independent developer; open source evangelist; author of the influential paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."
The Open Source Town Meeting will include ample time for audience comment and questions. O'Reilly's partners in the event will have informational displays on their open source-related efforts. Partners include:
Apache Group, C2Net Software, Inc., Crynwr, Linux International, Linux Journal, Penguin Computing, Red Hat Software, Inc., Samba, Scriptics Corporation, Sendmail, Inc., SIlicon Valley Linux Users Group, Songline Studios, USENIX, Whistle Communications.
The Open Source Town Meeting is a followup to the private Open Source Summit that O'Reilly hosted for a small group of key open source developers in April 1998. Another outgrowth of that meeting is Open Source Developer Day, a daylong workshop for those who want to learn how to develop and market open source software, which takes place from 9:00am-4:30pm the day of the Town Meeting.