Day 2 of this conference started better than day 1 since I didn't get lost getting here. First up for me today was a talk entitled The Development Commons: A Virtuous Circle of Software Production for Virtuous Organisations. The presenters for this were Jason Cote and Julian Eglestaff, both of Freeform Solutions. They provide IT solutions for not-for-profit organisations. They use free software in their work, and they ensure that any software development they do as a result of their work is also contributed back to the commons. Essentially what not-for-profits pay for when they come to FreeForm Solutions is time - time for Freeform staff to find a viable solution to their problem set. One of the positive features of their business approach is that, knowing their client base, they aim for solutions that require zero maintenance for the client, and which adhere to strict budget constraints. Jason and Julian know that not-for-profits usually only have a very precise amount of money allocated for a specific IT solution, and that there is no tap they can turn on to make more money flow later. So the solution they provide effectively has to be able to run forever. Jason also pointed out that they have a business policy of not dealing with any client that wants to have an exclusive development relationship with them. If the client isn't happy to have the code that gets developed for the their problem contributed to the wider commons, they can find someone else.

The next talk I attended was David Eaves' presentation on Community Management as Open Source's Core Competency. This is a subject close to my heart so I was keen to hear David's take on it. David has a great presentation style that keeps the audience interested and gets them involved. He is also somewhat sceptical about claims to the collaborative nature of open source, but perhaps he was merely playing devil's advocate in order to provoke discussion. In any case, he offered some suggestions on how to facilitate collaboration that he imported from his experience in the realm of politics and international relations. I don't have any disagreement with his suggestions, but I find myself somewhat sceptical of his basis for some of his sweeping generalisations about open source development communities. I find that nearly every FOSS development project I engage with is unique. It takes me a fair bit of time to get a strong sense of how the community works, to pick up on the explicit and implicit rules of engagement. Even two different projects in the same development "house", so to speak, for example two projects from The Apache Software Foundation, will have slightly different ways they do things, different expectations of participants perhaps, and of course, different real people with different real personalities that are struggling to cohere. It takes time to learn the particularities of communities. Since David's initial insight into the importance of community is definitely on the mark, I'd love to talk to him after he has more experience with actual FOSS development communities and has taken the time needed to engage with one or more of them in a serious way.

I'll pass over Jesse Hirsh's talk on The Problem with Open Source: Know Your History quickly since I didn't feel there was sufficient content there to grapple with, but maybe this is just another example of me being the wrong audience for this talk.

Yesterday, lunch was a pleasant surprise meeting new people. Today I spent my lunch hour with those same people and about 50 others. David Eaves and Mark Surman ran a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on Open Source, Open Communities? At tech conferences, BOF sessions are usually unscripted opportunities for people with a shared interest to get some quick interaction. With so many attending this BOF, I wasn't certain David and Mark would be able to do much at all. I was wrong. It was great! Having marked a line across the room with a "yes" at one end and a "no" at the other, they got everyone up on their feet and asked them to "place" themselves on the line in response to a series of provocative statements made by Mark. David then went up and down the line asking people why they either agree or disagree with the claim. In this manner we explored such questions as the role of democracy in open source projects and the importance of collaborative skills for a project leader. Stimulating and thought provoking.

After lunch I went to hear Rory McGreal talk about Copyright control and open access: From Queen Anne past Bill 60. Rory knew his stuff and spent the hour exploding 10 myths about copyright. I thought I knew this subject inside and out, but I learned a fair bit, especially about how we treat copyright in Canada (well, to be fair, I've been away for 13 years so I've sort of lost touch). One thing I've learned is that whenever two or more people gather in Canada to talk about copyright, the first person they mention is Michael Geist :-)

The final talk of the day was again a plenary session. This time the keynote speaker was Dirk Riehle, who leads the Open-Source Research Group at SAP in California. Dirk was speaking on Open Source Economics: Stakeholder Perspectives. This was an excellent presentation, filled with succinct clarifications of terms, clear statements backed up with actual data, and sensible conclusions: a model. Dirk's analysis traced the path from "traditional" Community Open Source (think of the Linux Kernel), to Commercial Open Source and its business models (think MySQL), to New Community Open Source which is similar to the traditional model but has significant integrators involved in the development (think IBM and Eclipse). Dirk's thesis, based on an economic analysis, favours the New Community Open Source Model. Fascinating stuff - I could learn a lot from Dirk.

And that rounds off what for me was a thoroughly enjoyable conference. It's always a treat to meet up with others you've only seen on some project's mailing list, or even just to see how enthused young people are about FOSS and FOSS development communities. It's a positive sign for the future.

[Just a reminder: if you would like to comment on any of these blog posts, please just write to me at randy.metcalfe[at]eifl.net. We'll get the real commenting facility sorted in due course.]