I am on the Programme Committee for the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Paris, and as a consequence I get to see the stream of paper submissions. There have already been a lot of diverse submissions and it’s already clear it will be a very interesting conference, but there is still room for more. Make sure you get your submission in before the August 8th deadline.
Of course, you can also contribute as a delegate. Registration is free and you can do it easily now. I suggest registering early as space is going to be at a premium.
In case you’re not familiar with ForgeRock, we’re a rapidly-growing startup that’s taking a radical software-freedom-first approach to creating an identity-oriented application platform – SAML, LDAP, provisioning, single-sign-on and much more. The software we’re developing is already mature and is already in use at around 50 of the worlds most interesting high-scale technologically aggressive companies. At OSCON I’ll be joined by colleagues to explain our philosophy and our software.
Afterwards, maybe some Norwegian music is in order? One of my favourite Norwegian musicians, Thomas Dybdahl, is playing the Doug Fir Lounge at 9pm.
While the journey is a long one, I always enjoy visiting Brazil. Some of my best friends live there, and the whole place infused with a positive energy that’s unique in my experience. So I’m delighted to have been invited to speak at two separate venues next week.
The first is the University of São Paulo, where I will be spending Monday afternoon delivering a seminar called Open Source Concepts and Realities. I’ll explore some of the ideas you’ll find on my essays page, as well as hopefully engage in discussion with other attendees.
The second is one of the world’s longest-running – and largest – Free Software conferences, FISL. Held in the far south of Brazil in Porto Alegre (which means the mid-winter weather may prove a little colder than the name “Brazil” usually evokes), it is attended by a wide range of delegates from business, education and government. I’m speaking twice; on Wednesday at 9am, explaining the restructuring the OSI Board envisages for OSI, and on Friday at 11am delivering my keynote explaining why “Software Freedom Means Business Value”. I also expect to attend the meetups for LibreOffice (Friday at 1pm) and for people considering the Apache OpenOffice project.
If you’ll be at FISL in Porto Alegre, I’d love to see you – I already know that many old friends are there too. Please use my contact form if you want to arrange a meeting.
If you’re at the Open Source Business Conference, OSBC, in San Francisco today and tomorrow, you have three opportunities to hear me speak (or three sessions to scrupulously avoid, depending on your taste). They are:
Why You Need an Open Cloud Platform to Build a SaaS, Monday 11:40-12:30
On this large panel, I’ll be commenting on the fact that there’s no way you can guarantee that you’ll not be locked in with a cloud solution today. Just as with other software solutions where your software freedoms are threatened, that doesn’t mean avoid them blindly, but it’s important to look for suppliers who actively protect the four freedoms in addition to promoting data freedom. This is also a context where community sentinels may be useful.
Harmony from Chaos: Understanding Project Harmony, Monday 14:00-14:50
Several participants in Project Harmony will be discussing both the goals of the project (the creation of a set of “standard” contribution licensing agreements for open source projects) and the current beta-quality drafts. I’ll be expressing my doubts about the need for CLAs and encouraging the audience to consider the community impact of having them.
A New OSI for a New Decade: Rebooting the Open Source Initiative, Tuesday 15:00-15:50
I’ll be leading a session, with other OSI Directors, explaining OSI’s plans for restructuring and the timescales and opportunities to get involved.
In all three cases I have a suspicion I may be an isolated voice in a conference that seems to have a lot of sessions about things like software patents, avoiding the “risks” associated with the GPL and other topics that would be amazingly controversial at FOSDEM or FISL. If you’re there, your support would be most welcome!
I just got a very welcome e-mail – an acceptance for my talk at OSCON in Portland this July. I’ll be speaking on Thursday morning, on this subject:
Most open source start-ups have some sort of lock on the code – dual licensing, contributor agreements, “open core” add-ons and more. But is it possible to start a profitable company without any of those – with just skilled people delivering expert service and developing new code in the community? I don’t just think it’s possible – I’m doing it!
All things being equal I’ll be planning another ForgeRock party while I’m there – watch this space for details!
Events bookings have become busy lately and I realise I need to put more data online. I’ve been working on the About and Events Booking pages on the site and in the process have added a Past Events page which I’ll gradually populate with details of the events where I’ve spoken.
I’ll be speaking at GoOpen in Oslo on Tuesday (on the Grand Panel at 20:00) and Wednesday (the closing keynote). I’d love to meet with you if you’ll be in Oslo this week – find me at the event.
I was asked for a two-paragraph “position statement” so the panel moderator knew where I was coming from, so I sent this:
Open source is what the older concept of software freedom turns into when it happens on the world-wide web. The ever-increasing reach of the web has led to ever-increasing use of open source. That expansion has made it increasingly a business requirement passed to suppliers that software used in enterprises is open source in some way. That in turn has made software vendors increasingly try their best to cheat, pretending that all it takes is an open source license to make something open source and that software freedom is irrelevant.
It doesn’t. Software freedom takes more than just a license. It takes a living community that’s open-by-rule, where every participant is free to pursue his or her own motivations for participating, doing so at his or her own cost. As the games companies play get more sophisticated, so the remedies communities create need to be more effective. Usually the best remedy is based on transparency, common sense and community empowerment. All the time open source is important, the game will be elevated, so I believe today we need benchmarks, best practices and inter-community co-operation if we’re to see software freedom build the open society I know it can.
That will be the background for my comments on the panel and for my keynote – what do you think? Comments below please – help me write my talk 😉
I am speaking at the ODF Plugfest here in the UK this morning, on the subject of the challenges facing the procurement of open source software by traditional enterprises (including the public sector). Based on a selection of experiences from ForgeRock’s first year, my talk considers procurement challenges that legacy procurement rules raise for introducing true open source solutions. My slides are available online. I consider two different needs:
The need for legacy procurement barriers to be removed. Examples:
requirements for indemnity that are only truly proportionate for proprietary software
requirements for copyright assignment and license negotiation
comparison of open source subscriptions with only the service portion of proprietary bids
a preference to sustain the lock-in caused by previous procurement
The need to recognise new value available from open source. Examples:
Removal of the need to administer end-user licenses
If we’re to see open source solutions bringing budget and change flexibility to government IT as the Prime Minister wants, both kinds of change – addressing legacy processes and lock-in (so that SIs are out of excuses) and seeking new kinds of value – are essential.
The Free Java DevRoom at FOSDEM was packed with people all day yesterday. At the beginning, Mark Reinhold (from Sun and now Oracle, the chief Java engineer) hoped to speak briefly about the new OpenJDK governance draft but faced plenty of searching questions about it – you’ll not get to see though, as Mark and Joe were unable to gain permission from Oracle for their talks to be recorded. But that was the last it was mentioned the rest of the day until my talk at 6pm.
In the interim were plenty of interesting talks, most notably Mario Torres and David Fu talking about their IcedRobot project to get Android apps to run on OpenJDK (and thus on any desktop). The room was packed out and had a line of people down the hall at the end of the day to hear Stephen O’Grady speak, and I was his warm-up act with a talk looking at the lessons I learned liberating Java into OpenJDK (I’ve uploaded my slides), putting the governance draft into context a little. O’Grady explained – accompanied by plenty of data – how despite the rumours to the contrary and an overall decline in apparent usage around the whole web application platform tool-set, the indicators for Java as a developer language are still strong when taken in context.
In the evening, the Free Java attendees all went for a dinner sponsored by Oracle, Red Hat and Tarent – a crucial part of the annual Free Java activity and one of the main reasons it remains a strong annual community. Meeting actual people and sharing a meal with them makes it so much easier to work objectively and avoid demonising people, and Tom Marble and the organising team are to be congratulated for the work they have put in to make it all happen. FOSDEM remains the meeting point for European software freedom because of the work they and others like them contribute.
I just got home from a week in Brazil, where I gave talks for IBM and for a large ForgeRock customer and also at the remarkable Campus Party. This is the second year I have spoken at Campus Party in Brazil and once again it was an interesting and overwhelming experience.
Campus Party started in 1997 as a LAN party in Spain (where people bring along their computers to connect to a massive network and play computer games) but has spread across the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world to become a global activity. The event in Brazil is held in a huge exhibition centre. Delegates pay to attend, then live on-site for the week, camping in pop-up tents inside the exhibition centre.
That was the source of one of the off-the-wall activities I participated in. Every delegate received a bath-robe from one of the sponsors, and near the end there was a bid to establish the Guinness world record for the largest crowd wearing bath-robes. Only a fraction of the Campuseiros participated, and there was still a dense crowd exceeding 1,500 people. Check the video:
The noise in the place is phenomenal and draining. There’s no daylight inside, just 24-hour activity. To get a flavour of the energy and variety, take a look at the Fickr photos. It’s now far more than a LAN party for two big reasons:
First, people are there for far more reasons. There is a Software Freedom camp (who were the hosts for my talk), a PC case-mod tournament, a group meeting to attack the digital divide, install-fests, live and electronic music – every aspect of the connected society as experienced by the 18-30 age group at which the event is targeted.
Second, there’s also conference content – and lots of it. Speakers this time included Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee and Steve Wozniak – and those are just the English-speakers. There were government panels, star speakers and novel content of every shade and colour.
The most striking difference takes a while to dawn on you, though. Usually at a conference there’s a theme – a programming platform, a social issue, a research thread. But not here. Unlike any other event I have ever been to, there is no single theme bringing everyone together, apart from the uniting motif of being a young adult in the 21st century. What’s brought people together is the Internet and the future. That has to be the ultimate post-post-modern un-conference possible.
All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
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