As the Web 2.0 conferences get into full swing, it gets me thinking about the search giants, events and what the heck Tim O'Reilly is doing in a suit.

As the Web 2.0 conference kicks off, I dove into the Open Source Infrastructure Workshop to see what open source hackers are doing for defining open systems and open formats that keep user's data under user's control and move the web away from closed systems that hold their users hostage.

Now that OSCON has wrapped up and I've caught up on sleep, its time to look back and see what shaped this year's excellent conference.

Jason Schultz from the EFF presented the most important patent issues that affect open source hackers and a few tips on what developers can do to avoid patent problems in their projects. If you don't know much about patents and hack on open source in the US, you should consider reading this summary of Jason's presentation.

Michael Radwin's "HTTP Caching & Cache-Busting for Content Publishers" talk covered a number of important issues that deal with Internet caching and some of the pitfalls associated with caching. This fast-paced and excellent introduction served as a great starting point for web developers to see if they need to delve deeper into this complex topic.

Ask Bjørn Hansen's "Real World Scalability" presentation left my head spinning as he peppered us for 45 minutes with useful tips for making sure your site is scalable. The talk covered vertical scaling, caching, database replication and making the most of their web server processes. If you're interested in a practical complement to Theo Schlossnagle's more theoretical approach to scaling your site, read this.

Semasiology of Open Source (part II) is a journey with many interesting points about open source, the history of reading and the public performance of source code. But please, don't ask me what it was all about.

Kim Polese's keynote presented some interesting insights into the world of open source and some of the issues that corporations face as they use open source. Kim's presentation used the long tail to show some of the issues that surround corporate use of open source. Thinking more about the long tail in open source yields some interesting thoughts.

Brian Fitzpatrick's Subversion tutorial was the perfect introduction to the new version control system that appears to be poised to take over for CVS. He presented a number of comparisons to CVS and outlined how Subversion was designed to address all of CVS' shortcomings.

Theo Schlossnagel's Scalable Internet Architectures tutorial presented some general rules on scalability and supported those rules with a lot of examples on how (and how not to) scale an internet site. In the course of the tutorial Theo presented a lot of open source source solutions that can save tons of money compared to conventional scalability solutions.