OSBC West 2006
Just one week after filling in for Ian at Evans DRC2 conference (which had the critics raving), I find myself back at the Argent in San Francisco at OSBC. I have to admit, I think this is the first time I've ever paid to attend a conference. As a veteran of the technical conference circuit, I guess I have to cut my teeth on the business side before jumping in. It means I actually have to pay attention during the sessions instead of bunkering down in the room to do email!
So far I'm a bit "meh" over the whole thing. From a networking perspective, it's been great. I'll spare the roll call, but it's been great to get some names to faces of people I've been emailing and chatting with since joining the foundation. The "meh" comes in with the sessions. It feels like there's a bit too much marketing for my personal comfort level. Perhaps it's simply because I'm used to the hard core techie conferences like Colorado Software Summit, and The Server Side Symposium.
I also mean marketing in another way - there's a lot of talk about how to "market" communities. How to build communities through marketing, and how to leverage marketing benefits from communities. I'm hoping that more emphasis will be put on the "business model" side of things as the conference evolves (it rotates around the globe with a conference in Europe in the summer and out East in the fall). I know many of the speakers here know a heck of a lot about making profitable business models, I rather hear about that than community musings (although the discussion about how Oracle would/could maintain the SleepyCat Community was neat).
I think the reason I bring this up is that I'm concerned that "Open Source" really is just a buzz word for traditional marketing, just as many of the hard-core developer skeptics would lead me to believe. I think it will be much cooler when we've moved past marketing and are talking about business models, business development and more importantly - how successful businesses can be built on COOL F/OSS ecosystems and platforms like Eclipse.
- Don
So far I'm a bit "meh" over the whole thing. From a networking perspective, it's been great. I'll spare the roll call, but it's been great to get some names to faces of people I've been emailing and chatting with since joining the foundation. The "meh" comes in with the sessions. It feels like there's a bit too much marketing for my personal comfort level. Perhaps it's simply because I'm used to the hard core techie conferences like Colorado Software Summit, and The Server Side Symposium.
I also mean marketing in another way - there's a lot of talk about how to "market" communities. How to build communities through marketing, and how to leverage marketing benefits from communities. I'm hoping that more emphasis will be put on the "business model" side of things as the conference evolves (it rotates around the globe with a conference in Europe in the summer and out East in the fall). I know many of the speakers here know a heck of a lot about making profitable business models, I rather hear about that than community musings (although the discussion about how Oracle would/could maintain the SleepyCat Community was neat).
I think the reason I bring this up is that I'm concerned that "Open Source" really is just a buzz word for traditional marketing, just as many of the hard-core developer skeptics would lead me to believe. I think it will be much cooler when we've moved past marketing and are talking about business models, business development and more importantly - how successful businesses can be built on COOL F/OSS ecosystems and platforms like Eclipse.
- Don
posted by Donald Smith @ 10:48 PM
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