May 16, 2015
Building a commercial Open Source Software company: a decade of changes
Paul Fremantle, WSO2
The world of Open Source startups has changed dramatically over the past decade. Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder of WSO2, has helped WSO2 grow from a set of contributors to Apache into a multi-million dollar enterprise with over 400 employees. In this session he will explore how Open Source has grown over that period and look at the factors, business models and challenges in building a commercial organization around Open Source. Paul will look at both the internal and external challenges, as well as looking at how VCs understand the marketplace.
Paul Fremantle is the Co-Founder of WSO2 and an active board observer and advisor. He was CTO of the company until early 2015. Paul is a committer and member of the Apache Foundation where he helped start numerous projects including Axis2, and Synapse. Paul previously was a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM where he led the open sourcing of three internal projects and added the first SOA support to the WebSphere platform. Paul plays the tin whistle and is a keen snowboarded. He is researching secure middleware for the Internet of Things at Portsmouth University.
May 17, 2015
How the Eclipse Community Works
Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation
Eclipse was the first of the open source foundations created as a consortium of corporations, starting a trend that has recently accelerated with the creation of corporate backed consortia for OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, OpenDaylight, and the like.
Mixing corporate and open source community interests in a single institution can be a recipe for conflict. But after 11 years of operation, the Eclipse Foundation remains remarkably functional and collegial. We have accomplished this by identifying a number of fundamental principles and sticking to them. This talk will describe those key principles and how we have implemented them within the Eclipse community. There will be lessons to be learned about how to balance the interests of many stakeholders, while remaining true to the core values of the broad open source community.
Mike Milinkovich has been involved in the software industry for over thirty years, doing everything from software engineering, to product management to IP licensing. He has been the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation since 2004. In that role he is responsible for supporting both the Eclipse open-source community and its commercial ecosystem. Prior to joining Eclipse, Mike was a vice president in Oracle’s development group. Other stops along the way include WebGain, The Object People, IBM, Object Technology International (OTI) and Nortel.
Mike sits on the Board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process (JCP), and is an observer and past member of the Board of OpenJDK
