In this issue

Some initial pictures from around the conference are available from the Apache Week site. In addition, personal pictures from attendee Kevin Burton are available.

On Friday the first keynote was given by the president of the Java Software Group within Sun, Patricia C Sueltz. She talked about how Sun views the open source movement.

She said that Sun has made three technology bets in the year 2000: computers will need to massively scale, that the network stack will need to be interoperable, and that devices will be always on and always connected.

Finally, she talked about how Sun views open source, and addressed some of the criticisms of their current approach. She said Sun was committed to working better with open source, and is working to improve its source license. Various pieces of software have been or will be released to open source groups, including the Tomcat servlet engine and the Xerces XML parser.

Over the next few weeks the ApacheCon site will be updated to include links to all the talks and papers that were presented.

Talks on Friday covered a variety of subjects, including XML and XLST, PHP, and Apache 2.0. There was also a panel discussion about the future of Apache after 2.0, including a variety of ideas for new features for Apache in the future. This included IO layering (such as the ability for the server-side includes module to parse the output of the CGI module), and replacable configuration engines so that configuration information could be stored in a database instead of a file.

The final session of the conference consisted of a launch of the first alpha of Apache 2.0. A number of ASF members on stage updated the website and copied the distribution files into the correct locations live of in front of the audience. Announcements were then sent to a number of key sites such as Slashdot and Freshmeat.

This was followed by a session of questions and answers about the conference. In general most of the attendees seemed to like the conference, with positive reaction to the speakers. An interesting point was that was that most speakers knew their subjects very well, and although not all were experienced speakers, they were preferred to excellent speakers without detailed technical knowledge.

Other comments were that the session lengths were just right and that the conference was good value overall. The main critisisms were the fact that lunch was not included in the conference price, the difficulty obtaining meals since BOFs were scheduled at lunch times, and confusion since the 'nightschool' sessions were not included in the 'full conference' registration.

Plans are already underway for the next ApacheCon conference, which will be in London in October this year. The conference will be smaller than the US show and tailored towards the European community. The next ApacheCon conference to be held in the US will probably be in San Jose in 2001.

The first meeting of the Apache Software Foundation members took place on the Saturday morning following the conference. A total of 27 of the 38 ASF members were present, together with representatives of the conference organising company, Camelot. A secret ballot was held to elect the new board of directors of the ASF as well as to elect a number of new ASF members.

In the first part of our coverage on ApacheCon 2000 we gave out an incorrect figure for the amount of donations to the ASF to date. The figure should have been US$35,000.

LinuxPlanet reported on ApacheCon in ApacheCon: Fueling the Web Revolution. The article gives a brief overview of the conference and highlights one of the popular talks on open source from IBM. The Melbourne Linux Users Group posted a number of pictures from the conference. O'Reilly published a detailed report on each day of the conference; Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.