Thursday, 3:30 in McConomy.
With the line becoming increasingly blurred between the Community and business as more companies become involved in the OSS space and valuations skyrocket, how do we ensure that the merits of Open Source and its ideals are not co-opted by corporations while still allowing for commercial enterprises' benefits?
Similar to a church, the Community provides the values for software creation and evolution based on an open development model that belongs to users with everyone contributing. A state, provides security to its people, akin to companies providing the quality assurance, packaging and services that many of its users desire. The two supply very different and yet complimentary functions. The Community ensures wide choice and flexibility, giving developers the opportunity to selectively tune and modify software to specifically suit their goals. The corporation provides the stability and ease of use for applying the software to real world business solutions.
A merging of those two groups would undermine the very elements that
allow them to successfully flourish. Thus the separation of church
and state is essential for OSS to retain the components that give it the
edge over proprietary software -- its freely available and constantly evolving.
This will allow OSS as it matures to remain THE software backbone of the
Internet.
Next | Previous | Author list | Schedule | YAPC 19100