OSBC Report from Boston

Matt Asay and the OSBC team put on a great conference in Boston the last two days.  I was skeptical that there would be enough people to warrant an east coast venue, but there were more than 400 people including a range of new emerging technology companies, investors, CIOs and IP lawyers.  (Unabashed lawyer joke: Remember, every healthy ecosystem has parasites!) 

There were three parallel tracks during most of the time (Emerging Trends, IT Executive, Intellectual Property) so it was sometimes tough chosing which sessions to attend.  There were also lots of impromptu meetings with various MySQL partners like Alfresco, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Pentaho, Intel, JBoss, Zimbra, Zend and others and sometimes that got in the way of a session I really wanted to attend.  And it probably would have been rude to leave the panel I was moderating in order to check out the email session on the CIO track. 

Thanks to all those panelists and audience members who helped tackle the issues around "Building a strong open source software company."  The panel included Stephen Walli (Optaros), Kim Polese (Spike Source), Doug Levin (Black Duck), Larry Rosen (Rosenlaw), John Powell (Alfresco).   While this topic was on the emerging trends track, we managed to have a full house and some good questions from the audience. 

Overall, a great conference that only continues to get better every time.  Make your plans for OSBC West in San Francisco February 14-15.  And bring a date. 

• TechTarget: Plenty of News at OSBC Conference
• Stephen O'Grady Blog: OSBC Day 1
• Illuminata Blog: OSBC Good Show!
• Dan Bricklin Blog: OSBC panel and Podcast with Robin Miller
• Matt Asay: CIOs Actually Care About Open Source