tbm's blog

We had a very productive FOSSBazaar meeting at Open World Forum in Paris earlier this month. The slides of the presentations are available and here are some notes about the meeting. We identified a number of issues that people are interested in, including:

Like last year, we're organizing a "Business of Open Source" mini-conf at LCA 2010 (Wellington, New Zealand; January 18-23). This mini-conf is for people interested in business aspects of open source. Topics of interest include licensing your work, building a market, building a community, gathering market data, distribution, communications, working with open source developers, working with governments and countries, working with procurement departments, corporate governance, funding, pricing, lessons from your experience, and whatever related topics people would like to bring up.

The CFP for this mini-conf is open now. If you're looking for a reason to go to New Zealand in January, this is your chance. Please check out the CFP and submit your proposal before September 27. If you have any questions, let me know at tbm@hp.com

FOSSBazaar will host a track at Open World Forum (Paris; October 1/2) about the governance of open source. We will have number of interesting talks: Martin von Willebrand will talk about Validos, Luc Grateau and Guillaume Rousseau will present INRIA's IPR Tracking Methodology, Michael Mahemoff from BT will talk about an open source governance tool, Bruno Cornec will give a demo of FOSSology and Charles-H. Schulz will present a checklist for engaging in FOSS projects. There will also be plenty of opportunities for discussions.

Here is the full program. Open World Forum is free but you have to register. I hope to see many of you there!

Someone recently asked me a few question about corporate participation in open source communities and I thought I'd share my thoughts on this topic here.

Are there differences between an open source project done for a corporation and one done for personal reasons?

There are many different ways to run an open source project, led by a corporation or by someone else. Some projects that are run by corporations have few outside contributors. This is often the case with projects that require copyright assignment (i.e. contributors have to assign their copyright to the corporation). These projects may not gain all the benefits of a true open source community, such as outside contributions or high levels of peer review. However, they may still be very successful projects and may have high levels of quality.

I visited Seoul last week to represent OSI at an open source conference and to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Korea Software Copyright Committee (SOCOP). SOCOP organized a conference with the title "Free Open Source Software License Insight Conference", and the international speakers included Brett Smith of the FSF, Brendan Scott of Open Source Law, Michael Coté of RedMonk and myself. From the questions we received, it seems that there is a lot of interest in legal questions related to open source. There were a number of folks from hardware companies that asked specific questions what they could do and couldn't do (e.g. related to including sources for GPL code and properly giving credit for BSD code).