LWE Wrap-up

We finished up Linux World Expo on Thursday and all headed our seperate ways.

I had an excellent time this year. It was good to catch up with everybody, start some new relationships and generally get to know more about the folks that we’re hosting.

I had a few really fruitful conversations that I hope start to really take shape into something more tangible. More on that later.

I would say the overall feeling of LWE this year was that a lot of these companies are left wondering why they were there. Attendence was way up this year (again) with 10,000 and 55 new vendor booths were added for a total of 200. I’m really excited about how big business is embracing open source but I’m left wondering if they know the best way to “give back” outside of letting their people participate.

The OSL just might be the answer. We started this thing sort of on a whim; we had a chance to do some good things for open source projects and we jumped at the chance. We found some good matches in Gentoo and Freenode and have been able to promote the use of open source both here at OSU but also in the community. LWE was really the exclamation point for me; the OSL is all about helping the community help itself. Our focus has been on the community distributions as well as projects that have a community focus. Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing wrong with Red Hat and SuSE. They have great business models and more importantly they are successful at what they do. However, I think there is a big missing piece here.

The community-based distros (Debian, Gentoo and now cAos (CentOS)) are fantastic platforms for users that just want something that works and that they have complete control over. Not only that, these distributions are released with many of the main themes in Free/Open Source Software as their underpinnings. We want to help these projects succeed by providing an economy of scale by co-locating them here at OSU.

There is much more to this than just an economy of scale. There are people and businesses out there clamoring for pay-for-support options for these distributions. How do you provide that and not slight the distributions and developers who work so hard with the right-thing-to-do attitude?

I love Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. Call me a fatty, call me un-healthy I just don’t care. The ice cream is dang good. You know what I really like about it? Ben and Jerry and what they have done to build a fantastic company with a conscience. Not only that, but the people that work there are happy to be a part of a team making a difference “just makin’ ice cream”.

Why can’t we do this with open source?

Here is what I am proposing. We start an open source co-op. Here is how it would work:

* Company X wants support for community distro Y.
* Company X pays for support to OS Co-op
* Company X employee calls phone number/gets on IRC and asks for help
* OS Co-op contracts with people in community distro Y to provide support
* OS Co-op takes a fair percentage of the contract and donates it to the OSL
* The OSL and its board of trustees works to determine priorities in the community distros for use of the donations.

Why not have an single group, acting as a community with rules and regulations, help drive some of the community distros? I feel like this could be an extremely successful business model as long as it is done responsibly and soley with the community in mind. Take care of the community and help it continue to flourish.