Call for Papers for Open Source Business Conference is now live
Driving through Provo Canyon with my family today, I saw ski season peeking through the clouds. It's hard to tell from this picture, but everything above 7,000 feet got drenched in snow this past week.
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
Early October and Mother Nature is already preparing for a season of the greatest snow on the planet. The Open Source Goat Rodeo may end up riding earlier than expected....If you're into open source, or you simply want to talk shop, I hope to see you out here this year for the OSGR or simply to ski.
I'd love to have some meaty open-source discussions in anticipation of the Open Source Business Conference 2009, which will be held March 10-11 in San Francisco. The Call for Papers just went live. I've already filled up a range of sessions, though they're not yet showing on the website, so get yours in soon. Some areas of particular interest, going off this next year's theme of "Open Sourcing the Enterprise":
- How do we make it safe, comfortable, and worthwhile for enterprise IT buyers - which develop most of the world's software - to contribute back into the open-source code community?
- How do we evolve open-source business models to ensure vendors get paid without resorting to the same lock-in tactics that the proprietary world has used?
- And how do we hedge against patent trolls and other parasites on the open-source community?
And so on. In sum, how do we grow the open-source contributor population, while simultaneously making it more viable and useful to the world? It should be a great show, as well as a great ski season in Utah. I'm not sure which I'm looking most forward to enjoying....
(OK, it's the snow I like best.)
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
