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.

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.