Sessions at TransferSummit 2011 about Open Source on Thursday 8th September

Even large established closed source companies with extensive mission critical IT requirements are turning to open source. They are recognising that open collaboration provides their business advantages through community based processes that have wide ranging benefits such as reducing cost or enhancing innovation.

For example, eBay Inc. are a highly successful e-commerce company with a large scale online marketplace and related businesses. Now, eBay is starting to open up by releasing some of their mature internal projects to the wider community. At the same time the company is more actively engaging with the open source project communities that are a fundamental part of their IT infrastructure. This presentation explains why eBay are going open and explores key steps they are taking towards creating a culture of openness within their IT division

Open Source continues to show up in interesting places. Earlier this year the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced it's intention to launch a software project aimed at providing better tracking and progress measures for all K-12 students in the US. Because the project is huge in scale and yet intended to be self-sustaining in 3-5 years, it is stipulated to be Open Source from it's inception. Learn how old dogs are learning (and teaching) new tricks in the US.

The mobile landscape has changed quite dramatically over the past few years, with the emergence of new mobile platforms and a significant shift toward open source in mobile technologies. What are the key economic drivers for this shift, and what are the lessons that can be learnt from the mobile industry's adoption of open source?

This talk will draw on Andrew's experiences as Open Source Manager for the LiMo Foundation. It will look at how and why open source has become commonplace in mobile platform development, and the advantages and pitfalls of using open source.

Why the government wants to level the playing field for open source

The quickly changing landscape of mobile technologies, products and services requires a continuous adjustment of the business and development models built around them. The Symbian operating system is an excellent example of this need to constantly readjust. Symbian started life as a closed and proprietary software product built by PSION in the late 1980's. In 1998 Symbian Ltd. was formed, a joint venture between world leading mobile technology companies. In 2008 Nokia acquired Symbian Ltd and in 2009 created the Symbian Foundation. The Symbian code was fully open sourced in early 2010, whilst the Symbian Foundation closed its doors in late 2010. Today the code is available via a Nokia platform and its future is uncertain since Nokia have entered into a collaboration deal with Microsoft.

In this talk Stephen will examine why Symbian has moved from a single vendor closed model, through a closed collaborative model and on into an open collaborative model. Stephen will also look at some of the challenges facing mobile companies with respect to adopting an open innovation model, using the history of Symbian to illustrate some of the potential pitfalls for companies in this space.

There is an array of Open Source licences out there, each with subtle, but often important, differences. Understanding the appropriate licence for your project and knowing your responsibilities with respect to components you reuse is critical to the success of any project developing or reusing Open Source products. Furthermore in order for users to adopt and reuse your code you must be able to demonstrate that you have the necessary rights to distribute under the chosen license. This presentation will cover each of these aspects of IP management in an open source project.

Why would anyone buy a software company that makes 95% of its source code available for free on the Internet? In the traditional model of jealously guarded trade secrets, such a company would be worth nothing.

Yet, in October 2010, Adobe bought Day Software, a small Swiss company selling content management products which are extensively based on freely available and permissively licensed code from several Apache Software Foundation projects.

This demonstrates that the value does not lie in the bits: source code is worth nothing without the skills required to integrate, maintain and evolve it over its whole lifetime.

What's valuable is the team behind the code. Their collective experience in creating solid software together. Their experience in working with loosely-coupled teams of volunteers from around the globe. The know-how of those who are able to integrate the open source parts into a coherent product that can be sold, supported and maintained for a long time.

In this session, Bertrand Delacretaz explains why Day Software chose to base so much of its core software on open source projects, how open development brings value inside the company as well as outside of it, and how open source and open development help increase your team's value.

Why would a company want to share its intellectual property in the way that an open development model requires? When a succesful software company, such as Alfresco, releases the program code for it's products as open source there must be a solid business reason for doing so. What is that reason?

For Alfresco the decision has paid off. in 2010 CIO magazine named Alfresco as one of "Twenty Companies to Watch" while the companmnies customer list is impressive. In this session Nick Burch will look at the benefits sharing can bring. It will look at how the open development model has enabled Alfresco to reduce costs and increase innovation. This in turn as enabled the company to enter a market that was previously dominated by multi-billion £ organisations. Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned is that the sharing model is a critical part of this success of Alfresco's products, in this talk we will look at how other companies might be able to produce similar results.

This talk will examine the implications of the current explosion of scientific data, the challenges of data-centric collaboration, and the need for new and more powerful tools to visualize and explore this data. We begin with a survey of some of the open source tools that Microsoft Research is creating in collaboration with the scientific community and are donating the Outercurve Foundation, an open source foundation supported by Microsoft. The combination of open tools and services with open data is leading to major opportunities for new ways of organizing and exploring data, and hold great promise for delivering scientific discoveries in new and exciting ways.

Intellectual Property law is never simple but open source licences go a long way to simplifying the life of a software producer seeking to collaborate with others. However, in the mobile space external factors can often limit options available. For example, app stores commonly have conditions that prevent some open source applications from being distributed while network providers seek to control software on their networks. These external forces can significantly affect the kind of development communities that can grow in the mobile space. In this talk Andrew Katz, a lawyer specializing in open source software, examines the interplay between mobile companies, community and licensing.

IBM has been engaged with open source projects for a very long time. In many ways open source is key to the companies strategy, but why is that?

In this session Don Harbison will examine IBMs motivations and strategies with respect to open source software. Using the OpenOffice project as an example Don will illustrate the key arguments for Open Source in IBM including standards adoption, product commoditization, open innovation, resource sharing and value creation.

OpenOffice was recently donated by Oracle to The Apache Software Foundation and IBM has committed its resources to help support the new Apache project's success, furthermore IBM has announced the contribution of the majority of its Symphony source code to the OpenOffice project. Don will illustrate why an independent, not-for-profit, software foundation was chosen, and why IBM is fully committed to the project's success.

What does authentic open source community governance look like? An open source community will involve many people gathering for their own independent reasons around a free software commons with source code licensed under an OSI-approved open source license. But there's more to software freedom than just the license. The key question any potential co-developer will want to ask is "what is the governance" - on what terms are people participating?