O’Reilly’s Executive (Open Source) Radar

Tim just released a preview of this year’s Executive Radar at OSCON. I helped put it together last year (“helped” being the operative term – Tim completely overhauled my anemic efforts to make the program into something worth listening to.

This year Nat and Allison have created the content with Tim’s help, and it looks excellent.

There are three big buckets we’re focusing on:

1. What role does open source play in the emerging Web 2.0 economy? What role should it play?

2. The challenges and opportunities as open source goes from a counter-cultural phenomenon

   to the mainstream of the computer industry.

3. Open source beyond software, including open source content and open source hardware.

I’ll post more on each of these topics over the next couple of days. But to whet your appetite, I’ll say that speakers on the first topic include Brad Fitzpatrick of SixApart on the LiveJournal scaling tools, David Recordon and Simon Willison on OpenID, Doug Cutting and Simon-Peyton Jones on parallel programming, and Eben Moglen on GPLv3. On the second topic, we’ll be talking to Matt Asay of Alfresco, Mike Olson of Oracle, Mårten Mickos of MySQL, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation. Speakers addressing the third topic include Karl Fogel of Subversion fame, Phil Torrone of Make Magazine, and O’Reilly editor Andy Oram.

Mike and I are going to be continuing our debate about licensing and what happens to open source when it “grows up.” I have tremendous respect for Mike, but I suspect we’ll both be taking the gloves off to talk through what open source means for challengers and incumbents, and whether the Proprietary Bloc can respond effectively to the open source threat/opportunity.

I just wish Tim would have given me an easier opponent. 😉