Business Models Workshop Live Blog - 12th Jan

For those who cannot attend the OSS Watch workshop on “Business and Sustainability Models Around Free and Open Source Software“ today we have a live blog available.

The days agenda is:

  • 10.00 Welcome & Fundamentals of FOSS (Ross Gardler - OSS Watch; Biography and abstract)
  • 11.00 Break
  • 11.20 FOSS Business and Sustainability Models (Rowan Wilson - OSS Watch; Biography and abstract)
  • 12.20 Lunch
  • 13.20 Commercialising Free and Open Source Software - an Oxymoron? (Rhys Newman - JPC; Biography and abstract)
  • 14.00 Running a Foundation to Contain Your Code (David Roberts - Symbian)
  • 14.40 Break
  • 15.00 Panel - What does this mean for you?

The live blog will cover all five sessions and is being hosted on the excellent CoverItLive site.

You can find resources for the event tagged with ‘ossw_fosssustain2009‘, if there are any twitter folk present we’ll be encouraging them to use the hashtag ‘#ossw

Participants will be able to suggest questions member of our team will, if time allows, put them to the speaker or panel session.

The sessions will be arhived for those who can’t log in live.

9 Responses to “Business Models Workshop Live Blog - 12th Jan”


  1. 1 MJ Ray

    Just a small note: CoverItLive seems to require javascript to allow comments, so set your NoScript.net settings appropriately, else it becomes watch-only. You could still feedback through twitter - shame it’s not using http://identi.ca/tag/ossw though

  2. 2 MJ Ray

    “Flash Player 9 (or above) is needed to view slideshows” and “No transcript available” on slideshare.net for the second presentation. Can the notes appear as html, PDF or something else open, please?

    I sometimes feel like I’m single-handedly trying to keep the “open source” buzz available to actual users of open source. Why doesn’t this seem to be worrying more people?

  3. 3 Ross Gardler

    It would be nice to use identi.ca but we don’t define what tool people use, we simply said the event tag is #ossw - the people selected twitter not us

    As for the slides, there is a download link on the slideshare page, click it and you’ll get OpenOffice.org versions

  4. 4 MJ Ray

    Well, the official messages (like the one above) linked to search.twitter.com and del.icio.us - I don’t think the FOSS competitors were given a fair crack.

    The download link on the slideshare page only appears for registered users. I don’t have time to review slideshare’s N pages of legal waffle today (trying to get ready for the Council Tax setting meeting as well as work) and I can’t remember the legal context OTTOMH - in particular who wins between USA Inc’s and UK laws on privacy, distance selling and unfair contract terms.

  5. 5 Damian Flannery

    Guys, thanks for putting on such a great workshop yesterday. I went home with a much clearer picture of all the issues relating to open sourcing a project. I still have many questions though, especially at the more technical / process level so I’ll probably be in touch soon. Wish I could have made it along to the pub afterwards!

    Cheers,
    Damian

  6. 6 Russell Nicholls

    Many thanks to all at OSS Watch for running a great workshop on sustainability models for FOSS. It answered lots of questions, but posed some more and I am going to be in touch about a specific project.

    The examples from Rhys and Symbian made lots of sense and put lots into perspective.

    Best wishes,
    Russell

  7. 7 Ross Gardler

    Thanks for the encouraging comments.

    All slides are now available in PDF, as is the archive from the live blog.

  8. 8 MJ Ray

    Thanks for the coverage. The archive link in the previous comment seems to go to some discussion of the live blogging system, although the heading is correct - what’s wrong with it?

    I was referred to the slides when I mentioned on the twitter or the live blog that cooperative models didn’t seem to be discussed in the business models session. I’ve looked at the slides and still don’t see any mention. A significant omission from a fairly good event.

  9. 9 Ross Gardler

    MJ the archive link is the link to the live blog coverage, it is not a discussion but what the live blogger and some commentators had to say as the event took place. There will be a full report from the workshop, but it takes time to pull all the information together and get it through our very strict quality control processes.

    Re coverage of cooperative models, see slide 8 from Rowan Wilsons presentation, titled “Academic Community Development”. The first bullet gives away what this was about, but it doesn’t include the word “cooperative” in the slide, thus you probably missed the topic this covered:

    “OSS licensing permits a varied group of contributors to work on software that addresses a particular problem domain.”

    Rowan also talked about cost reduction through cooperative development on this slide. However, we do agree it should really have had a separate slide to make it clear that it is a separate business model.

    Thanks for your feedback.

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