Open source fans get first major conferences

Open source software (OSS) was officially recognised by top conference organisers in the US late Monday night when they announced that a chain of Linux and Apache-based events are to be held there next year.

A spokeswoman for Redhat Software - one of the main developers of Linux - said: "This proves that open source has truly arrived."

She said Redhat is extremely excited about the series of conferences which point towards the momentum being created in the OSS space at the moment.

Conference firm O'Reilly & Associates said the decision to invest conference resources in OSS reflects the high levels of credibility and market share the movement has achieved over the last year.

The Redhat spokeswoman added that more and more corporations are getting into open source software. "One financial company - who refuses to come out of the OSS closet - said it's too good to refuse." Most users, she said, describe it as rock-solid and cheap.

The events will span a wide range of OSS' - developed by thousands of organisations and programmers over the Internet - including Apache, Linux, Perl and Sendmail.