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.

Oscon is over, I'm home and recovered both from jet lag and just general exhaustion.

Oscon is a very broad conference so there is a lot to learn and many people and projects to befriend. There are many things and angles one could write a blog post about. To me Oscon is above all the conference to meet other open source people and have the deep and inspiring discussions. So in that spirit I will make a few philosophical remarks in this post, thoughts from Oscon 2013.

If you'd want to read a run-through of the conference itself, I recommend Dirk van den Poel's very extensive summary.

Good afternoon Oscon attendees - in particular attendees of my High Availability in MySQL tutorial!

Attached you can find a spreadsheet (both LibreOffice, Excel) that we will use at the end of the tutorial. You can also download the slides, in case you wish to browse them at your own pace.

I found a very interesting blog post today: Open Source IaaS Community Analysis. It is a statistical analysis into forum/mailing-list traffic of the 4 major private cloud open source projects: OpenStack, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus and Cloudstack. While I have never met or read anything from the author, qyjohn, it seems we actually worked at Sun at the same time :-)

For a casual follower - like me - of these four cloud projects, the post is interesting in many ways. But for anyone interested in open source business models it is very interesting indeed. Readers of this blog will remember my research from 2010: How to grow your open source project 10x and revenues 5x. The research showed that 9 out of 9 Xtra Large projects are all governed through foundations, whereas the best performing open source codebases owned by a single vendor have developer communities that are roughly 10x smaller. Based on this observation I made this recommendation:

Slides from my talk at OSCON 2011 are now up on Slideshare:

2 weeks from now I'm giving a talk How to Grow Your Open Source Project 10x and Revenues 5x at OSCON (in Portland, Oregon). It is based on the article with the same title I published last year. The talk is scheduled to end a one day sub-track called IT Leaders Summit. I'm glad it is categorized as a business talk rather than community talk - things I write usually are problematic in that I typically cover both business and community and see them mostly as harmonious topics, whereas most other people see them as opposites.

Here are the slides for the "State of MariaDB" lightning talk I did at OSCon.

We've been mingling here for 4 days already, but today the official part of OSCon kicks off. At Monty Program we've been a bit late in preparing for this conference - busy getting started with the company and everything. But even if we were a bit late, we succeeded in lining up a good set of sessions.