I’ve been working with Nat and Allison to plan the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing on Open Source at OSCON. I thought I’d share the focus of the program, and ask you, our readers, for further input.
There are three big buckets we’re focusing on:
- What role does open source play in the emerging Web 2.0 economy? What role should it play?
- The challenges and opportunities as open source goes from a counter-cultural phenomenon to the mainstream of the computer industry.
- Open source beyond software, including open source content and open source hardware.
I’ll post more on each of these topics over the next couple of days. But to whet your appetite, I’ll say that speakers on the first topic include Brad Fitzpatrick of SixApart on the LiveJournal scaling tools, David Recordon and Simon Willison on OpenID, Doug Cutting and Simon-Peyton Jones on parallel programming, and Eben Moglen on GPLv3. On the second topic, we’ll be talking to Matt Asay of Alfresco, Mike Olson of Oracle, Mårten Mickos of MySQL, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation. Speakers addressing the third topic include Karl Fogel of Subversion fame, Phil Torrone of Make Magazine, and O’Reilly editor Andy Oram.
In addition, we’re having our usual roundup of presentations by interesting open source startups who are on our radar. It’s in this area that I’d most like your help. What are the most interesting projects or startups on your radar? Who would you most like to meet, and what questions would you want to ask them?
Roger Magoulas of O’Reilly Research and Jason Allen of Ohloh will also drill down into open source trends as demonstrated by book sales, job data, project activity, and other measurable statistics.