ApacheCon started off with the annual State of the Feather plenary, from the President of the ASF, Jim Jagielski. Along with a brief overview of the health of the Foundation as a whole, we had some great news: IBM has come on board as a Gold Sponsor of the ASF!
Then the ZDNet journalist Dana Blankenhorn opened with a keynote about The Year Of Apache, talking about both how corporations play well (or not) with open source, and Apache’s place in the software and business world. It was funny hearing someone else talking about the value of having a globally unique name.
To see everything happening at ApacheCon this week, please read the Program Guide (PDF) online.
Tell your Atlanta area friends: our evening Meetups starting at 8pm tonight and Thursday night are free to all, and we’re looking forward to plenty of locals joining us. Learn about and talk with committers and users of:
- Wednesday 8pm: Cassandra, QPid, Maven, Social Widgets and Portals
- Thursday 8pm: Subversion, Tomcats, HTTP Server, DeltaCloud, and Felix & OSGi
Even though I didn’t get a cool black cap (I was too late coming over to the infra table to claim one), I’m still having a blast. Along with the people, one of the things I love about the community at ApacheCon is that it brings people from very different backgrounds together. There are plenty of competitors in the real world who collaborate on shared projects here at the ASF, and it’s great to be able to have good and friendly conversations here, where we might be competing against each other next week when we go home back to our $dayjobs.