Last night, I moderated a panel entitled "Open Source: Ready for Prime Time?" that was sponsored by TechCoire amidst the dark hills of Sacramento. These intrepid panelists joined me in the (very) long afternoon drive from the Bay Area:
- Paul Jahn, Partner, Morrison & Foerster
- Allen Leinwand, Venture Partner, Panorama Capital
- Jacob Taylor, Co-founder and CTO, SugarCRM
- Lance Walter, VP of Marketing, Pentaho
I've attached a copy here of the short slide deck that we used to introduce some of the basics around open source. It really was just the basics, though, so I recommend that you visit the Open Source Initiative, SourceForge, or Wikipedia to get more information.
Since it's impossible to blog your own panel, I'll just post a few observations:
- It was pleasantly shocking that half of the attendees had worked on open source projects. We had planned for an audience of enterprise IT folks with little to no experience with open software. The fact that half of them were already using open source was enlightening.
- Everyone on the panel agreed that though the developer community is helpful for code contributions, where it becomes absolutely vital is around support, documentation, feedback, fixes, and the like. A community that helps to develops these resources around a project is worth its weight in gold.
- Plan, plan, and plan again about what your long-term goals are before you commit to open source and license selection. Making these strategic choices thoughtfully up front will save you unending toil later.
- Plan carefully around what code you will bring into the tree, and monitor it carefully for any undesired license baggage. There were many questions from the audience about how intake processes, and how to best manage code contributions from the community.
By far, the most questions to the panel centered on how the rules of open source would apply to various scenarios. It was not only clear that this crowd is already working with open source, but also that they are thinking hard about long-term strategies. It wan't a tough sell for the panelists to share their passion on this subject. Folks really got that open source is not a secret, special way of writing code; it's a way of building the business around your code, and a philosophy on what parts of the offering have value and what should be easily accessible commodities.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys techcoire pentaho sugarcrm mofo panorama open source technology
