The Open Source Initiative recently organized its first conference: State of the Source 2020. I presented a talk In Defense of Extreme Copyleft, where I explored the boundaries of current network copyleft licenses and potential need for further - carefully deliberated - expansion of copyleft licensing.

In 8th grade, our home economics class got an assignment to create a scrapbook describing our adult life. Students would cut and paste - I mean literally, with scissors - pictures from magazines to create a portfolio with their 3 bedroom houses, one or two cars, a dog, and so on.

I of course did it a bit differently. I spent hours drawing a log cabin that my future family would live in. The cabin was in the wilderness in Lapland, where I operated some tourism related company as a family business. This was a few years before I would hear about the internet, or own a cell phone. But in my dream future I used a fax and satellite phone to operate my business. Btw, it was also years before I heard the word "startup" :-D

Earlier this year I performed my last act as Drizzle liaison to SPI by requesting that Drizzle be removed from the list of active SPI member projects and that about 6000 USD of donated funds be moved to the SPI general fund.

Drizzle project started in 2008, when Brian Aker and a few other MySQL employees were moved to Sun Microsystem's CTO labs. The background to why there was demand for such a project was in my opinion twofold:

It's been almost a year since my last update on features I've added to the impress.js presentation framework. Already a year ago I had pretty much merged or implemented all of the open backlog for the project. But at the end of the post I still listed two popular requests I hadn't implemented: Support sub-steps and 2D navigation.

During June-July I had pretty much completed adding the features that I myself had in mind impress.js (as you might have read on this blog back then). Some of those features of course had been asked for multiple times by others as well, in particular the ability to define slide positions relative to the previous slide, was a popular request, with several pull requests proposing it as well. Now that I've added such a plugin, I have to say it is indeed much more convenient way of authoring presentations.

A month ago I did an exciting journey to Portland, to present two talks in the field of Open Source business strategy. One at OSCON, and the other was a keynote session at the Community Leadership Summit.

O'Reilly does an awesome job recording all the talks in Oscon, and they let the speakers download and share a copy of their own talk. Thank you O'Reilly! The CLS talk was also recorded, but I haven't seen it published yet. The Kaltura guys do all of the filming and post production on the side of their day jobs, which is a respectable amount of work to do for the community. I'll update this post when the video does become available.

Last Friday noonish, I was back at PDX. I had decided to invest in the Thursday night parties - to strengthen those bonds of friendship that are the backbone of the open source community - then sleep, pack and take the light rail to the airport in the morning, skipping the remaining Friday morning conference sessions. I had already been at the convention center 6 days in a row, figured it would be enough for now.

Vacation is almost over - and it's still 17 degrees outside :-( It's time to start packing for Portland.

I'm as excited as ever, since this year I'm delivering 2 talks. Both fall into the category which is a long time passion of mine - open source community and business. It's refreshing to not have to talk about databases for once :-)

CLS

The Community Leadership Summit is mostly an unconference, but in recent years have started adding short 15 minute pre-arranged talks. (Kind of like morning keynotes, even if they don't call them that.) On Sunday the 19th, I will be do a talk called Open Source Governance Models Revisited.

By popular demand I have decided to continue my series on selling open source (Part 1, Part 2).

A couple readers both reacted my previous blog with more or less the same words: This is great, but what about the level of mission criticality of the use case? Surely you should count that as a third variable since it impacts the likelihood of a user becoming a paying customer?

Lead qualification

So, yesterday I wrote about what the sales funnel looks like when selling open source software, compared to what it used to look like when we sold closed source software. In this post I will build on that theory with some practical conclusions. (I assume you've read the first post.)

Why modeling your business matters

When running a business we need to do budgeting and other planning related activities. If you don't, you'll probably run out of money at some point. Also the point of planning is to capture as much of the business potential out there as possible. For example, to sell 5MEUR next year, do we need 5 sales managers or 6? (...and, can we afford 6?)