“For those who have not been to OSCON, it’s a great technical conference covering the whole spectrum of open source, including Linux, MySQL, the LAMP stack, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, middleware, applications, cloud computing, and more”, said Zack Urlocker from InfoWorld. “OSCON always has great keynotes, tutorials, and evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. As with many conferences, a lot of the meat takes place in hallway conversations and impromptu sessions”.

Matthew Russell, our VP of Engineering at Digital Reasoning, will be speaking at the conference again this year. Matt will be sharing his insights about Natural Language Processing, advanced analytics, and entity resolution on a massive scale. (See here for more details: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/13988)

I recently sat down with Matthew, and asked him about open source, OSCON and his upcoming participation. The following is part of our discussion:

Jason Beck – So, how long have you been involved with OSCON?

Matthew Russell – I’ve attended and spoken at OSCON the last three years?

JB – You’ve worked within or supported the Intelligence Community the last several years. Have you seen a change in attitude towards open source?

MR – Absolutely. Whereas it was treated very skeptically years ago, it’s now practically a requirement for any project we do.

JB – Why is that? Aren’t there lingering issues or concerns for security?

MR – A few people still claim those issues. However, the reality is that open source is inherently more secure. Think about it, you have potentially thousands of eyes looking over code and quickly addressing issues. However, if you have a piece of proprietary software or code, you may look at that more infrequently, since fewer people would be looking at the code.

JB – Is there someone that inspired you within the open source community?

MR – Not really. The thing is, open source is by its nature more about the community than about any one person within that community. It is all about collaborating with others to make something useful.

JB – Why would someone want to attend OSCON?

MR – It has quickly become the preeminent conference on open source technologies, issues and ideas. Seriously, it is a place where you can meet other interesting people committed to doing interesting things.

For more information on OSCON, you can visit their website at www.oscon.com/oscon2010