OpenSource World steps into LinuxWorld's more constrained shoes

In announcing this week that a new event, OpenSource World, will now usurp the long-standing, LinuxWorld extravaganza held annually in August, conference organizers IDG World Expo are continuing down a path mapped out back in 2005.

Like the late LinuxWorld, the newly born OpenSource World will take place in San Francisco. Meanwhile, O'Reilly & Associates is moving its own open source fest, OSCON, from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco.

This will leave the Linux Foundation's LinuxCon, a show traditionally held in Portland, as the industry's sole remaining major Linux-only fest.

Although the abandonment of the LinuxWorld moniker is giving some people a jolt, the name OpenSource World seems better suited to supporting a large-scale trade event, particularly during these very uncertain economic times.

Open source development has burgeoned these days not just on Linux but also across operating environments that include Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, and, as always, BSD Unix. Then, take into consideration that virtualization has helped open doors for operating systems to run on each other's native platforms, and you realize that the open source communities are now overlapping into one big group anyway.

To its credit, IDG World Expo seems to have foreseen this expansion of open source development quite some time ago.

To illustrate: In 2005, the conference organizer decided to hold a then-brand new event -- LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit -- in New York City the following February, while hosting both the flagship LinuxWorld event and the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) on the West Coast later in 2006.