SFO or Bust!

Jason McKerr and I will be down in San Francisco on Monday through Wednesday night spreading open source goodness and hopefully getting some traction on the creation of a FOSS Foundation. More on that below.

Chris Messina has been kind enough to organize a meetup of folks in the Bay Area to have a beer or three and talk all good things around open source, etc. So if you’re downtown Monday evening, come find us at the Thirsty Bear.

On Tuesday afternoon, I’ll meet with several other folks will be meeting at the OSAF to talk about the possibility of creating a FOSS umbrella foundation. Originally we had talked of creating a Web 2.0 foundation to help the fledgling projects in this space but then realized we’d feel like fools when either a) the bubble burst or b) Web 3.0 hits.

At the OSL we help people with hosting their projects. From Mozilla to Debian to Freenode and many, many others. Hosting is just one more thing that rapidly growing projects should not have to deal with. It takes away from their “main thing” of developing a great piece of software or platform, etc. In our workings with these projects, we see them in the same place in terms of managing their finances, yearly accounting, defining their governance and even in the formation of their own non-profit foundations.

The goal of this as-of-yet-to-be-determined FOSS Foundation is to help with the other things that projects need in order to get to where they are going. Every project will have a different journey. Some will become their own non-profits, some will want to stay under the umbrella. Others might want to land under another umbrella group like the Apache Software Foundation. What ever it is, let’s keep people focused on their “main thing” and continue to accelerate the pace of innovation within open source.

Please contact Chris Messina or me if you’re interested in attending the meeting on Tuesday. Hope to see you there.