Sessions at OSCON 2011 about Open Source on Tuesday 26th July

Essential experience and advice for anyone managing open source in a business.

We are more than a decade into the widespread use of open source in business, but there is too much focus on the compliance only, and the "risks" of using open source code. This talk is about moving beyond compliance and making the positive case for using open source in business based on reduced cost, improved time-to-market, and yes, freedom.

Security and open source have a history that goes back to an era long before computers. The story begins with 19th century linguist Auguste Kerckhoffs and his principle that security isn't found in obscurity. We will cover the intertwined and lesser-known history of security and open source from then to now, with his big idea as a guiding principle, making a compelling argument for open source.

Studying our most popular open source projects we find that 9 are significantly larger, roughly 10x, than any of the other projects. These "XtraLarge" projects have some notable characteristics that are interesting to anyone wanting to grow his/her open source project to similar magnitude and importance. Ex: All are collaborative non-profit community projects, with modular software architectures.