“The 4th annual O’Reilly Open Source Conference was as much
fun as last year. This show has much the same flavor of
Usenix–geeks talking to geeks. The main difference is which
geeks. At Usenix you see virtually all UNIX (including Linux
and *BSD) geeks. At the O’Reilly show you see mostly Perl
geeks.”
“Why? Because the O’Reilly show started out much different than
Usenix. It was originally a Perl conference. Perl started as a
UNIX-based scripting language but things are changing. With Perl
expanding into the MS-Windows area (mostly for CGI programming) and
the conference expanding in the direction of Open Source, the mix
at the show continues to change.”
“This is my second year in attendance and I see the change. For
example, while there was a Python track at the conference last
year, the interest level in Python was much higher this year. For
example, there was a session on Zope the Python-based web content
management system.”