O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing: Open Source in the Hot Seat

18 Jul 12:13

The first O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing will take place on Tuesday, July 25, 2006 at the Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon.

For VCs and business executives, the Executive Briefing is the place to be to gain a competitive advantage over their peers. "Vanilla open source won't make them money," notes organizer Matt Asay. "They have to ratchet up their understanding of open source and strategies for leveraging it." Asay and fellow Executive Briefing organizer Tim O'Reilly have planned an intense day of frank conversation, tough questions, and unscripted answers designed for maximum interaction among all participants. In the open source tradition, the event draws on the collective wisdom of the audience as well as insights from onstage innovators.

Schedule:
Welcome and Opening Remarks: Open Source 2.0, Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Tim O'Reilly introduces four big ideas that are featured in this special Executive Briefing day: Web 2.0 and the architecture of participation beyond software asymmetric competition (changing the rules of the software industry) the challenges to the open source model provided by software as a service and open data. In the course of the day, he'll put "traditional" open source companies on the Hot Seat, and put the Spotlight on innovative projects and startups.

The Ghost in the Machine: The Impact of Open Source on Web 2.0, a conversation with:

Jim Buckmaster, CEO, craigslist
Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Jeremy Zawodny, Developer Relations, Yahoo! Inc.

Everyone knows that Google, Yahoo!, and many other Web 2.0 companies are built on top of open source, but how exactly do they use it? What's more, how do they apply principles from open source to other aspects of their business? How does a Web 2.0 business differ from a traditional software business? This conversation explores these topics and more. We'll also put the participants in the hot seat: how do they give back to open source projects when source code alone isn't enough for people to recreate the application?

What's Microsoft Doing with Open Source? - Bill Hilf, General Manager of Platform Strategy, Microsoft Corporation

Steve Ballmer recently opined that the more open source commercializes, the less worried he is about it. That's open source as a competitor to Microsoft, but what is Microsoft doing to embrace open source internally? This session is a birds-eye view into how the industry's biggest software company is embracing open source and how open source is increasingly pervading Microsoft: the Linux lab, the Sourceforge projects, the Shared Source licenses, etc.

Asymmetric Competition - a conversation with Jim Buckmaster, CEO, craigslist.

Craigslist is the seventh most trafficked site on the Internet, with only nineteen employees, because the users do most of the work themselves. Built on top of open source, and using open source principles to build its data and services, craigslist is reshaping the marketplace of classified advertising. But because advertising on craigslist is mostly free, it's not taking the revenue from competitors, just changing all the rules by which those competitors do business. This is a classic example of asymmetric competition. Sites built via user self-service and an architecture of participation provide a huge challenge to existing business models, and a huge opportunity to reshape the economic landscape of their industries.

Deployment, Not Just Development - a conversation with Ian Wilkes, Database Architect, Second Life

Web 2.0 applications aren't software artifacts they are software services. In software as a service, deployment and management issues can be as important as development. Ian Wilkes shares insights from the front lines about what tools applications like Second Life need from their open source vendors.

Operations as Advantage - a conversation with Brian Behlendorf, Co-founder of Apache and CTO of CollabNet

In a world where software is delivered as a service, the quality of a company's operational infrastructure is a key source of competitive advantage. Is this a world where scale matters? As someone who's got deep roots in both open source and the software as a service world, Brian Behlendorf addresses some of the challenges that the SaaS model provides to open source.

Hot Seat: Open Source, Asymmetric Competition, and Web 2.0

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB
David R. Skok, General Partner, Matrix Partners
Michael Tiemann, VP, Open Source Affairs, Red Hat, Inc.

For years the software industry has largely competed on the basis of symmetry: Oracle versus IBM in databases BEA versus IBM in application servers etc. Feature wars, price wars, but not true competition wars. That is, competing by playing a different game, with different rules. Open source enables an alternative battleground upon which to compete, with community, code, and culture the new competitive tools. This session brings together the top open source executives deploying these tactics of asymmetric competition, to learn from their experience.

Spotlight: Who's on the O'Reilly Open Source Radar? - Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.

At O'Reilly, we keep our ears to the ground on promising open source projects and communities, especially ones that are "on trend" with some of the big issues that we see shaping the industry. This is your chance to meet some of those that sit on top of our list. The heads of companies and projects that we think should be on your radar have ten minutes each to blow your mind and make you see the open source world in a new light:

Greenplum - Scott Yara
Hyperic - Javier Soltero
Django - Adrian Holovaty
DabbleDB - Avi Bryant
Alfresco - Kevin Cochrane

Technology Trendspotting with the O'Reilly Research Data Mart - Roger Magoulas, Director, O'Reilly Research

Roger Magoulas reviews the latest technology trends and visualizations from our data warehouse of book, blog, and jobs data.

The World Is Light: The Rising Tide of Intellectual Property and the Need for a New Marketplace for Rights - Irwin Gross, General Partner, Worldview Technology Partners

The fastest-growing source of value in the U.S. and other developed economies is creative output - ideas, designs, code, and other intangibles, embodied in intellectual property rights such as patents and copyrights. They comprise the key assets in virtually all high-value technology products and services yet there is no broadly functioning, efficient market for intellectual property rights. The result is billions of dollars wasted each year on delay and litigation. We must put a stop to those losses by developing working markets for the exchange of intellectual property rights. Open source has provided one model for eliminating such losses, but how broadly can it be applied, and what other types of solutions should we consider?

Hot Seat: Open Data - Chad Dickerson, Yahoo! Inc.

Data is the "Intel Inside" of Web 2.0 applications, the source of competitive advantage and lock in. As a consequence, it won't be long before "open data" becomes as hot-button an issue as open source software has been. Recently, Zoomr, a competitor to Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!) wanted to use Flickr's own web services API to help users to move their photos from Flickr to Zooomr. Flickr's been a pioneer in open web services, but they drew the line there. Was this the first shot in the "open data" wars?

Google's Ajax Web Services Interface - Mark Lucovsky, Google, Inc.

The former architect of Microsoft Hailstorm, now the architect of Google's Ajax search services, talks about the next generation of open services from Google, and how developing on the world's largest platform is different.

Firefox as Platform - A Conversation with Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Mozilla

Firefox's market share growth has reignited the browser wars. JavaScript 2, the first major update to Javascript in seven years, makes it far easier to develop Ajax applications. Not only that, Firefox has created a rich platform for extensions - not all of which are open source - and redefined the web experience by creating ways for users to access their favorite web properties without visiting their sites. And to top it off, Mozilla has generated big money while remaining a non-profit. And then there's the deep relationship between Mozilla and Google.

Taken from Information Security Bulletin.