Two of the biggest open source events in Europe both announced their calls for papers today. Open World Forum 2009 will take place in Paris in October (preceded by the Open Source Think Tank) while Open Source Meets Business 2010 will take place in Nuremberg in January next year.
The theme for Open World Forum 2009 [...]

Last week during my presentation of Open Source is Not a Business Model at the ISV Forum I was running through some observations about community engagement best practices for traditional vendors when Stephen Walli asked me whether we thought a community manager should report to engineering or business executives.
As Stephen notes I side-stepped the question [...]

There were plenty of clever and interesting things said during this week’s Open Source Business Conference. These are the things I felt compelled to write in my notebook, in chronological order. Some of them confirm things we already think about commercial open source, others were new ideas to me, or interesting ways of expressing old [...]

I’ll be heading over to the West coast at the end of the month for a short trip that will take in EclipseCon - including the Open Source Executive Strategy Summit - OSBC, and the Open Source ISV Forum.
It promises to be a busy and interesting trip and I’m looking forward to an intensive week [...]

Ian Skerrett has announced the details of the Open Source Executive Strategy Summit, a one-day event scheduled to take place alongside this year’s EclipseCon next month.
The summit is a one day event for business executives responsible for their organizations open source strategy and is designed to answer two questions: 1) ‘What Open Source Strategies Are [...]

On the open source panel at the recent 451 client event I was asked by Raven what impact I expected the current financial situation to have on M&A for open source vendors. I responded that I expected to see an increase in M&A activity related to open source in the first half of next year. [...]

Next week I’ll be jetting over to Lyon to attend ICT 2008, the European Commission Information Society’s research event for information and communication technologies.
It promises to be a fascinating and lively event and will examine topics such as European Union priorities in ICT research for over €2 billion of funding available in 2009-2010, the major [...]

Matt Asay has an interesting post today on how its getting harder to distinguish between open source and SaaS which reminded me of the presentation I was scheduled to give at a recent SugarCRM event in London.
Due to illness I was forced to cancel my appearance (and it’s a good job I did as my [...]

What happens between a company announcing its intention to license its code using an open source license and the resulting project being launched?
Mostly the answer involves a whole lot of legal discussions as the intellectual property and licensing issues are ironed out and the processes and structures are put in place to support the [...]

Another year has passed by in a flash and OSCON, O’Reilly’s annual open source convention, is upon us. Fellow 451 open source analyst and Portlander, Jay Lyman, will be with me all week at the Oregon Convention Center to check the pulse of the open source development community, meet with vendors and clients, reconnect with [...]

I’m very pleased to say that I’ve been invited to join CIO.com’s first Executives Online discussion panel, Open Source in the Enterprise, this week. As the starter post explains, the event is a virtual round table discussion bringing together a number of open source executives, and me, to discuss the enterprise adoption of open source [...]

This year was my first chance to visit the Open Source Business Conference, so while I can’t compare to previous years I must say I was impressed with the consistent quality of both the keynotes and the breakout sessions. One of each particularly stood out for me, however: the keynote from Jon Williams, CTO, [...]

Matthew Aslett and I are in San Francisco for the next few days at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). We will be moderating a total of three panels this year. Matthew’s panel on the the state of the open source database market is especially interesting, given that we are days away from publishing a [...]

I’ve been making preparations this week for the panel I’m moderating at this year’s OSBC conference in San Francisco. The title is The State of the Open Source Database Market, and we’re lucky enough to have a great panel, featuring: Andy Astor, CEO, EnterpriseDB; Roger Burkhardt, President & CEO, Ingres; Ken Jacobs, VP Product Strategy, [...]

I’m in Napa, CA, through Saturday for the 2008 Open Source Think Tank (OSTT), hosted by the Olliance Group and DLA Piper. This is my second year at the event. I’ll be spending the next few days with some exceptional people in the open source business community, tackling issues such as commercial open source business [...]

Could Microsoft acquire an open source software vendor? Yes, is the answer, according to Steve Ballmer’s comments from the Web 2.0 Summit. However, I think there’s some reading between the lines to be done here. Microsoft could certainly buy an open source user, but at this stage an open source software vendor might be a [...]

I’m home in Portland (arguably the open source software conference capital of the world) for the third annual GOSCON get-together. Linux Foundation Executive Director and keynote speaker Jim Zemlin says he may have been mistaken in thinking that attendees were fairly well-versed in Linux and open source. The reality is that while these attendees — [...]

Further to my recent post about how open source is a global model that enables the growth of local software ecosystems comes news that Indian open source developers are trying to assert the country’s position as a contributor, rather just a user of open source.
As Glyn Moody reports, FOSS.IN - “India’s premier FOSS event” - [...]

Much of the talk leading up to this year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo centered on how the open source OS has become so mainstream, it seemed somewhat silly to have its own conference. However, the conference (bolstered by the concurrent Next Gen Data Center show) did highlight the continuing evolution of Linux and other open [...]

Jay Lyman and I are in San Francisco this week for LinuxWorld 2007. I was planning to post an entry last week with an invitation for people to reach out to the two of us for meetings during the event. However, Jay and I are booked solid for the entire conference. 40 meetings. Seriously. [...]