Effective Commercial Open Source Strategies Reloaded

Last week I held the “Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy” workshop at OSiM, the definitive industry event on Open Source in Mobile.

Stephen Walli and I this year worked out a richer workshop outline, aimed at covering open source software business and community issues, as well as IPR issues.

Each attendee was first encouraged to say why he or she came to the workshop, and to assure that the workshop could be as interactive and productive as possible,  we agreed to conduct it in accordance with the Chatham House Rule.  As a result all attendees were very open and pragmatic about debating around open source in mobile strategies, discussing frankly their different views on this matter.

Beyond general information about open source economics, this year we digged deeply on the world of opportunity around collaborative open source development. Android’s technological club, LiMo, Maemo and Moblin different approaches were at the centre of a brainstorming session.

Tips and hints from open source leaders such as Brian Aker, Brian Behlendorf, Miguel de Icaza, Jim Grisanzio and Ian Skerrett were presented and discussed. As a result a compendium of lessons learned within some well known organizations – namely Apache, Debian, Eclipse and OpenOffice.org – was brought out on the occasion of the workshop.

Instead of talking of “open source business models” (see Stephen’s recent post on this matter if interested in the subject) we spent more time on open source product management and “open source productization“.

My ‘traditional’ customers and vendors open source perspectives‘ analysis was replaced by an introduction to IPR management, scratching the surface of how IP can be used to empower your business strategy.

Funambol and other real case examples were proposed and discussed, along with some ‘new’ ideas like open source network marketing.

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