About this Tux Talk
Everyone must be aware of the economic impact that Open Source software is having; it's turning the software industry from a products to services industry, and creating tremendous value for end-users that those end-users retain. But just how do these communities of different stakeholders - with different objectives, different employers, and different standards for quality - ever manage to write software? They do it by combining a more ad-hoc and agile approach to writing software, with tools designed to connect a distributed community and context to the code being authored.
Instead of the waterfall methodology's nearly Soviet belief in the power of prediction and planning, we get a process more about sustaining software throughout its production use lifespan, turning expert and lead users into code contributors, orchestrating the kind and arrival of those contributions into the code tree, and unlocking real code re-use.
Companies are now turning these principles loose upon their own internal software development efforts, including joint development projects. Doing so requires some careful thought and planning, but has the potential to radically reduce the costs and implementation time of in-house software.
About Brian Behlendorf
Brian Behlendorf is a well known leader in the Open Source community. He co-founded the Apache Server Project, and was the first President of the Apache Software Foundation. He is on the Executive Board of the Mozilla Foundation, which is responsible for the Firefox web browser. Brian also founded and served until this year as CTO of CollabNet, a company which he co-founded in 1999.
Event Schedule
This session was originally presented on June 14, 2007.
