Schedule: The Business of Open Source: From Project to Product sessions

All staff involved in production of any product that contains software must know the basics of license compliance, and copylefted and GPL'd software is in nearly everything. The GNU General Public License (GPL) requirements are both technical and legal. Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler share the information you need to ensure your company's compliance with the GPL and related licenses. Read more.

Are you thinking about open sourcing your codebase? Octopus Deploy started as a closed source project, but the company is making an effort to open source more of its code. Damian Brady explains why Octopus Deploy choose to open source software that is core to its business, how it chose what parts to open source, and how the company ensured it won't lose intellectual property and market advantage. Read more.

User story mapping gives you strategies to view features alongside the problems they solve, allowing you to prioritize features regardless of your technical expertise. Emily Stamey walks you through user story mapping, teaching you how to plan your project as if it were a vehicle and deliver the most valuable features to the customer by answering the question, "What’s your skateboard?" Read more.

Open source offers developers a community rich in innovation, feedback, and interaction, but many open source vendors find it difficult to create lasting businesses that can compete with proprietary software over the long term. Monty Widenius explores open source monetization options and ways to generate funds necessary for software development while balancing the needs of a dedicated community. Read more.

Rikki Endsley explains how you can improve your writing before you start writing—using solid advice from Stephen King. Rikki shares tips and tricks collected over 15 years in tech publishing writing for audiences of all levels and shows how with proper planning, you can easily repurpose your content for multiple audiences. Read more.

A large, successful open source project runs a lot like a business. Indeed, some large, successful open source projects are businesses. Safia Abdalla explains why open source is the best playground and laboratory for new entrepreneurs and why this is a good thing for open source projects. Read more.

How do you quickly grow and manage a fully distributed engineering team? Suyog Rao and Michael Basnight share their experiences and lessons learned over five years spent growing an engineering team from 15 to over 200 members in over 30 countries. Suyog and Michael focus on team structures that work well, hiring, communicating effectively, and balancing open source and commercial development. Read more.

We all know the tension between open source and corporate stewardship. Are corporate and community interests aligned? Who makes the calls? As projects grow up, OSS projects must find ways to transcend their corporate boundaries or risk losing steam or being forked. Jonathan Lipps shares the story of how one large open source project found a sustainable future after corporate incubation. Read more.

Echoing arguments that have been made by the free and open source community for decades, the fact that software patents place unconstitutional limits on free speech is starting to receive judicial recognition. Daniel Byrnes examines what this and other recent challenges to the validity of software patents mean for the future of software development. Read more.

As open source projects increase in size and complexity, open source-adopting professional services companies become their champions as partners in their clients’ projects. Drawing on their experience with Drupal, Jenn Sramek and Mark Sakurada share technical and management observations from 10 years in growing professional services companies in an open source community. Read more.

You’re an open source true believer ("Software wants to be free; power to the programmers!"), but your passion doesn’t exist in a vacuum. For our projects, teams, companies, and communities to thrive, they must meet the needs of business. Jessica Rose examines how to make a lasting peace between our shared ideals and an industry that often seems disconnected from the better angels of our nature. Read more.

Bianca Jiang explores the paradox of open source compliance and continuous delivery with open source, sharing her experience, lessons learned, and the best of DevOps principles. Along the way, Bianca outlines a microservices-based architecture and offers a fresh perspective on compliance requirements. Read more.

Mackenzie Burnett explores the challenges and opportunities of starting an infrastructure-based startup in a postcloud world dominated by AWS and explains what's possible in the still-emerging markets centered around the growing cloud. Read more.