This year ApacheCon has been fortunate to secure keynotes from three figures prominent in different areas of open source. Each of them relates to different aspects of maintaining an open source culture and community, and the relationships between open source and the corporate world.
Scaling: Lessons Learned and Their Applications to Apache Culture
Theo Shlossnagle, OmniTI—Tuesday Feb 26, 9:15am
Over the last 15 years of building highly scalable systems, I've seen my fair share of failures. Some are fascinating, some are embarrassing, some are grotesque, all share something fundamental. The lessons learned exploring the pathology of these failures can be applied to more than just operations and systems design. Corporate structure, software development and even community structure suffer from the same weakness. I'll take you on a whirlwind tour through some awesome failures and share why I think they happened.
A widely respected industry thought leader, Theo is the founder of OmniTI and the author of Scalable Internet Architectures (Sams) and a frequent speaker at worldwide it conferences. He was also the principal architect of the Momentum mta, which is now the flagship product of OmniTI’s sister company, Message Systems. Born from Theo’s vision and technical wisdom, this innovation is transforming the email software spectrum.
Building New Communities
Steve Holden, The Open Bastion—Wednesday Feb 27, 9:15am
Open source communities have traditionally built by geeks, for geeks. As the first open source foundation the ASF led the way, and its policy of meritocratic governance has been a model for many communities. Times are changing, however, and open source is growing incredibly fast. This leads to stresses, particularly around issues such as gender diversity and corporate involvement. I'll review some of the challenges faces by many open source foundations, and suggest that it's time for them to become less "geek isolationist" by pointing out some of the potential advantages of engagement with a broader community.
Steve Holden has been involved with the Python community for almost twenty years, and was an open source supporter even before the term was coined. He is the founder of Holden Web and The Open Bastion, and founded PyCon, whose US incarnation is billed as the largest developer conference in the world and now runs in almost thirty countries. Steve has spent eight years as a Python Software Foundation director, and served as its chairman for three years. He has worked diligently to make Python and all open source projects more accessible and more inclusive. The author of Python Web Programming, Steve is a frequent speaker at technical conferences.
Growing Authentic Communities
Luke Kanies, Puppet Labs—Thursday Feb 28, 9:00am
A fantastic, engaged community is the dream of many companies, but it's too easy to let the company's needs overwhelm those of the community. In this talk, Luke Kanies discusses how Puppet Labs has managed to continue growing its community even while it has changed dramatically over the years, including growing from 3 to 100 employees and converting almost entirely from services revenue to product revenue.
Luke is the founder and CEO of Puppet Labs, and the original author of Puppet and many related tools. He graduated in Chemistry from Reed College in 1996, started his career as a system administrator, and has been an open source contributor and speaker since 2000. He has presented and published on DevOps, open source, startups, and cloud computing, and is opinionated about technology in general and product design particularly.