Friday, March 19, 2010

The business of open source, again

Preparing for EclipseCon, I had a chance to browse my past presentations. At EclipseCon 2007 I presented The Garden & the Market: The Value of Eclipse Open Source. This is probably my favorite presentation, and I think there still is a lot to say.

When I gave that presentation in 2007, I was working at a company where open source was a minor means of software creation. Since then I joined Red Hat and now open source is the means of creating software. The whole question of building a business based on open source suddenly becomes more pressing. :)

One aspect I really liked about that presentation was the audience participation. We genuinely had a conversation, one which in several cases lasted longer than the actual presentation itself. I'd like to loop back with the Eclipse community this year, and see how things look three years on. When I arrive at EclipseCon, I'll seek to secure a BoF slot for this purpose, and I look forward to the conversation. If anyone would like to meet separately, please drop me a comment here (or to the email in my profile), and we'll try to meet.

1 comment:

Scott Lewis said...

Hi John.

Unfortunately, I'm not going to EclipseCon this year, so can't offer to meet up with you...but I do think you are onto something WRT economics, game theory, etc and it's relevance to sustainability in open source. For example, you might find this interesting: The Evolution of Cooperation