Sam Varghese
Friday, 08 January 2010 06:07
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
In some respects, it is a little surprising that, given the intense business interest in free and open source software, Australia's national Linux conference only took up the topic as a separate mini-conference last year.
This year,
Martin Michlmayr, a senior Debian developer who was leader of the project for two years, will be organising the "Business of open source" mini-conference at the
LCA in Wellington.
The miniconf will be held on the Monday (January 18) of conference week, and Michlmayr's speakers are all lined up and ready to go, he told iTWire in an interview.
Michlmayr has chosen
seven speakers, to hold forth on everything from ways to destroy a FOSS community to building a service business using open source.
"The miniconfs are organised quite autonomously," Michlmayr said in response to a question. "LCA provides the infrastructure but each miniconf has its own organiser who publishes a Call for Papers (CFP) and then selects talks and creates a schedule."
He has a mix of speakers and says he tried to create a balanced programme "in which regulars and new speakers share their experiences about interesting topics and where the audience has the opportunity to participate."
The organising of such a discussion stream comes naturally to him as his job at HP is something on similar lines. "My role at HP is to work with and support various open source communities, both inside and outside the company," is how he puts it.
"One of my main responsibilities is to facilitate activities around FOSSBazaar, a working group of the Linux Foundation that is dedicated to sharing, discussing and improving best practices related to the governance of open source within an organisation.
"As more and more companies are adopting open source, there is a great demand to talk about ways of governing open source, i.e. managing the use of open source within an organisation. This miniconf covers some aspects of this governance question but also looks at other business questions related to open source, such as how to start a successful business around open source and how to grow a community."
Michlmayr says last year's mini-conference on the same topic went off very well, which was why he proposed the topic this year. "We decided to propose the 'Business of Open Source' miniconf since it was very well received last year. We had very interesting topics and very good participation from the audience."
"Obviously, some people face travel restrictions these days (due to prevailing circumstances) but we managed to put together a miniconf with a good selection of speakers from New Zealand, Australia and overseas," he says.
As indeed he has - there are people from Australia (
Arjen Lentz,
Jacinta Richardson), New Zealand (Cameron Beattie). the UK (Belinda Lopez), Canada (Emma Jane Hogbin) etc.
