I’ve just spent an enjoyable couple of days in Oxford at the Community and Open Source development workshop. A diverse mixture of researchers, software developers and open source experts gathered to debate how to build the all-important community of users and developers that drive successful open source projects. Many people think that open source is just about developing some code, sticking an open source licence on it and posting the lot to your website. Unfortunately, successful projects – those with long-term sustainability – need far more nurturing than this. The workshop explored what that nurturing actually entails and how to go about it.
My role was to act as the technical reporter and there will be a full report on the workshop in due course. In the meantime, you can view some of the slides at Ross Gardler’s slideshare space.
My other mission was to interview Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of Sourcesense, a leading European open source services company. His company made headlines a few months ago when they agreed to partner with Microsoft on an open source file reader for the controversial OOXML office document format. It was an extremely interesting interview and the results will be featuring in a couple of pieces I’ve been commissioned to produce in the near future. In the meantime though, I can reveal that Gianugo was trained as a lawyer and his mother was somewhat dismayed when he told her that he was abandoning a highly lucrative legal career to, as she understood it, “give software away for free”.
Tags: OOXML, opensource, OSSWatch, ossw_community2008, Oxford, sourcesense
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