After 10 years in Portland, Oregon, OSCON – O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference is moving in 2009 to the San Franciso Bay area. I was just at OSCON this past August in Portland and it’s somewhat sad to think that it was the last OSCON to be held in Portland.
Then again San Franciso is a bigger market and though it hasn’t yet been publicly announced there is widespread speculation among the people that I talk too that IDG’s LinuxWorld Conference is not coming back in 2009. So it makes sense for OSCON – which is not a dead show and is extremely vibrant – should come into SF and try and take up the mantle that LinuxWorld will likely be abandoning.
In an interview on the Oregonian an O’Reilly spokesperson notes that travel and the bigger SF market are some of the other reasons for moving.
The creator of Linux – Linus Torvalds lives and works in the Portland area, though Torvalds has not been seen at an OSCON event in years.