Software is eating the world, Open Source is what's driving innovation. In this interactive fishbowl session I would like to work with the audience to explore the advantages of being actively involved in the open source projects that you use at work, which arguments work in convincing your employer that contributing patches upstream makes a lot of sense business-wise. I would also like to explore the legal, process and people challenges companies face when setting out to increase their open source involvement.
Instead of a talk where one human speaks and others are listening the goal with this session is to involve the audience in exploring what it means to transform a business from merely using open source projects in their day to day work to actually being involved upstream. How to identify the kinds of contributions that make sense for upstream projects? What are the legal, process and people challenges with becoming more active in the open source world? Which arguments worked for you in convincing your manager to give you time to work on a patch? What properties should you watch out for when trying to identify projects that are welcoming patches from downstream users? Open Source as a movement is at an important point today: While adoption is raising to ever higher numbers, there are projects that are suffering from a lack of development power. To quote an article on Open Source sustainability from The Apache Software Foundation published: https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-way-to-sustainable - "At Apache, more users means more success since they are our future contributors." In this session I would like to explore what it takes to make that conversion from user to contributor.
Speakers: Isabel Drost-Fromm