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→What does it mean to be a "good" vendor in an open source meritocracy?
The difference between an open source software project that gets new adopters and new contributing community members (which is to say, a project that goes on existing for any length of time) and a project that doesn't, often isn't a question of superior design or technology. It's more often a question of whether the advocates for the project can convince institutional leaders AND front line developers that a project is stable and trustworthy. What are successful strategies for attracting development partners? I'll try to answer that and talk about what we could do as a community to make collaboration easier.
== Thoughts from an open source vendor - What does it mean to be makes a "good" vendor in an open source a meritocracy? ==
* Matt Zumwalt, Data Curation Experts / MediaShelf / Hydra Project, matt@curationexperts.com
What is the role of vendors in open source? What should be the position of vendors in a meritocracy? What are the avenues for encouraging great vendors who contribute to open source communities in valuable ways? How you answer these questions has a huge impact on a community, and in order to formulate strong answers, you need to be well informed. Let’s glimpse at the business practicalities of this situation, beginning with 1) an overview of the viable profit models for open-source software, 2) some of the realities of vendor involvement in open source, and 3) an account of the ins & outs of compensation & equity structures within for-profit corporations.
The topics of power & influence, fairness, community participation, software quality, employment and personal profit are fair game, along with software licensing, support, sponsorship, closed source software and the role of sales people.
This presentation will draw on personal experience from the past seven years spent bootstrapping and running MediaShelf, a small but prolific for-profit consulting company that focuses entirely on open source digital repository software. MediaShelf has played an active role in creating the Hydra Framework and continuously contributes to maintenance of Fedoraand Blacklight. Those contributions have been funded through consulting contracts for authoring & implementing open source software on behalf of organizations around the world.
==Occam’s Reader: A system that allows the sharing of eBooks via Interlibrary Loan==
