Foreword: This essay by Matt Asay explains why he and others organized the inaugural Open Source Business Conference, set to take place March 16-17 at the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco. Asay and others organized the OSBC in their free time. Asay currently works for Novell, previously worked at Lineo. and studied under Open Source legal expert Lawrence Lessig at Stanford.

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Open Source for Capitalists
Open source, though growing fast, has not yet “won.” We stand at a pivotal moment. Open source developers have done their job. They write great software. They have developed an infrastructure upon which companies and individuals can build, without fear of having the platform used against them.

Yet despite all the attention paid to open source; all the momentum behind it; and all the progress it has made, the open source community has overlooked one critical ingredient to its ultimate, overwhelming success:

Money

While some will disagree, open source cannot claim victory until it is paying the salaries of its core developers, as well as creating jobs for associated services (Sales, Marketing, etc.). That is, I view a fair measurement of open source's success to be its impact on the global economy. More money. More jobs. More software, doing more things that are useful to more people.

And yet there has been virtually no public discussion of the topic. One book (Thanks, Clayton!), and just about nothing else.

In mid-2003, I founded Open Source Business Conference to fill the void.

Why me? I'm not sure. Maybe no one else felt the pain that I felt, and could marry that to a job that frequently took them to industry conferences where the void was obnoxiously evident. Having worked for two years with an embedded Linux startup (Lineo), and then for another 1.5 years for Novell, I was tired of butting my head against the monetization problem. My companies could not afford to embrace open source and contribute to it without measurable and significant return on that investment.

Given this, it was galling to read the self-trumpery of some in the community who too easily accepted the “Open Source will win because open source is Right/True/Divine” argument. Successful as open source has been, it has not been a wild commercial success, a failing that I was convinced would persist without successful business models to promote it. (I used to battle constantly with my professor, Larry Lessig, on this topic. I think he was glad to have the semester end.) No, there had to be money in the equation to make open source truly dominate.

LinuxWorld San Francisco, while great in many respects, proved the straw that broke this camel's back. On my flight back from the conference, I complained to a good friend about its dearth of open source business discussion. He encouraged me to do something about it (I guess he did not want to listen to me whine), and we spent the rest of the flight sketching out a rough speaker and topic list, plus a budget. I soon convinced two other friends to join the planning of the conference, both with a background in open source, and away we went.

Instead of opening the conference to speaker proposals, we hand-selected each speaker (with very few exceptions). My job with Novell took me to just about every industry event: I knew who had interesting things to say. We reached out to them, and slowly built a formidable conference faculty, one that is today absolutely unparalleled in the industry. With Clayton Christensen (Author, The Innovator's Dilemma and the follow-up The Innovator's Solution) as our cornerstone, the best open source business minds flocked to the conference.

We then assigned topics to these speakers, because we wanted the conference to address very specific issues that have yet to be resolved. These topics include:

• What business models will drive open source for the coming decade?
• What open source business models are proving successful today, and what are their shortcomings? How does dual-licensing work? Is there life beyond services for Red Hat? Need there be?
• How do corporations integrate their development teams and roadmaps into the community's?
• What effect is this having on the community, as corporations seek to exert influence over open communities?
• How can traditionally closed-source vendors and buyers adopt open source while mitigating legal risks inherent to the open source development model?
• Where are the growth areas for open source, and which areas of the software stack are unlikely to be commoditized by open source in the near term?
• Finally, what do vendors and the community need to provide end-users to make it commercially viable for them to deploy on a wide scale?

OSBC will attempt to answer these questions, among others. While it is doubtful that The Answer will be found to any one of these important questions at OSBC, my hope is that OSBC will provide fertile soil for good ideas to be planted and grow. That is its purpose: to drive the commercial viability of open source software, and consequently breed more of it.

Eight months later, I think OSBC will meet this goal. It has been a total garageworks, built from scratch in the organizers' spare time. No corporation is behind it, though each of our employers (especially Novell, I must say) has been supportive. We bootstrapped every aspect of the conference. But next week, attendees will be treated to an amazing collection of the industry's brightest minds and top strategists. It is not an opportunity to be missed. We've needed this conference, and now we have it. Come join the conversation.

The Open Source Business Conference: Home of Open Source Capitalism will take place Mar. 16-17, at the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco, CA. More details are available at the OSBC Website.

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About the author: Matt Asay is part of Novell's Linux Business Office and Open Source Review Board, where he helps to lay the strategic and business foundation for Novell's use of open source software, especially the Mono project. Before Novell, Asay was General Manager at Lineo, an embedded Linux software startup, where he ran Lineo's Residential Gateway business. Asay started his open source career in the investment arm of Mitsui & Co., where he co-managed Mitsui's investment in Cobalt (a successful Linux-based microserver startup that was acquired by Sun Microsystems for $2 billion). Asay earned his Juris Doctorate degree at Stanford Law School, spending two of his three years studying software licensing and innovation, and specifically the GNU General Public License, under Professor Larry Lessig. Asay also holds an MA from the University of Kent and a BA from Brigham Young University.

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