Workshop A: Commercial Open Source Strategies at Work
Led by Stephen Walli, Independent Consultant, My Own Consultancy

Workshop Summary

Today enterprise companies and vendors are often adopting open source software components and platforms, but most of the times they lack the proper policies and procedures. This workshop will cover general open source software business and community issues, providing the audience with all information needed to define and implement effective open source policies. Attendees will learn how to assess open source opportunities and risks, understand community issues and come away with an idea of how to obtain competitive advantages through a well-designed open source strategy. Among the open source topics to be addressed are: open source economics, intellectual property management, projects and communities. The workshop will be conducted through a series of units, fostering participation and discussion.

Your Workshop Leader

Stephen has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor. Stephen currently consults on software business development and open source strategy, often working with partners like Initmarketing and InteropSystems. Stephen organized the agenda, speakers and sponsors for the inaugural Beijing Open Source Software Forum as part of the 2007 Software Innovation Summit in Beijing. Stephen’s a board director at eBox, and an advisor at Bitrock, Continuent, Ohloh, and TargetSource (each of which represents unique opportunities in the FOSS world). Stephen was the open-source-strategist-in-residence for Open Tuesday out of Finland. Stephen was Vice-president, Open Source Development Strategy at Optaros, Inc. through it's initial 19 months. Prior to that he was a business development manager in the Windows Platform team at Microsoft working in the space between community development, standards, and intellectual property concerns. Before joining the platforms business team, he was a program manager onRotor, the shared source implementation of the ECMA Common Language Infrastructure standard on Windows and FreeBSD.
He was executive staff (vice-president, R&D) and a founder at Softway Systems, Inc., a venture backed startup that developed the Interix environment to re-host UNIX applications on Windows NT. The Interix product juggled core Softway developed code, Microsoft licensed code, and a wealth of OSS covered by a myriad of licenses. Softway was acquired by Microsoft in 1999.

    09.30 Registration

    10.00 Session One: Open Source Economics
  • Why open source matters (software, business, engineering)?

    • 11.00 Break

    11.15 Session Two: Projects and Communities Dynamics Governance Issues
  • Trading off between participation and control Business-centric (MySQL), Project-centric (Linux), Foundation-centric (Eclipse)

    • 12.30 Lunch

    1.30 Session Three: Open Source Software in a Business Context
  • The Software Business versus the Project
  • Developing and supporting products
  • Managing submissions in a company context
  • Marketing your open source community

    • 2.45 Afternoon Coffee

    3.00 Session Four: Intellectual Property Management
  • A bit of history and context
  • Licensing from a business perspective

    • 4.15 Conclusions and Questions

    5.00 Close of Workshop