The Business of Open Source

Open Source is a powerful tool that companies very rarely harness to it’s full potential. GitHub, a leading open source software hosting company, is fortunate enough to be on all sides of this issue – building a business model around open source tools, releasing several of their own libraries and services as open source and hosting the open source projects of several large companies (such as Facebook, Yahoo, Digg and Disney).

This talk will cover how open source can benefit your existing business – how to identify existing projects that can be open sourced, how to build a community around them and handle patches for them. We will also talk about how to build a business around open source tools successfully – what to do and not do and how the larger OS community will react.