Bruce Perens will speak at Stanford University on Thursday, March 6th, 2008, from 12:00 to 1:30. He will deliver his talk Innovation Goes Public. The talk will be at the Psychology Building, Jordan Hall, 450 Serra Mall, Room 420-041. Lunch will be provided. Here are directions.
Perens will show how Open Source software is often the most effective strategy for creating and utilizing new innovation, and has become the mechanism by which the smartest companies distribute the cost and risk of non-business-differentiating software development. He will explain the economics of Open Source in terms of the conventional "capitalistic" economic model, and how Open Source works for profit-generating companies. His talk will be clear to beginners yet informative even for Open Source pros.
This talk has been the keynote at the recent Olswang (law firm) Open Source Conference (London, UK), The EU Government Digital Business Ecosystems conference, and many others.
Open Source provides much of the software infrastructure for many of the world's largest companies and organizations: Merrill Lynch, Google, Pixar, Amazon, the City of New York, and probably you - although you might not know it. Innovative products like Linux, Firefox, and Apache are the market-leaders in their sectors, but there are tens of thousands of Open Source programs, used for just about everything. But the economics of Open Source are non-intuitive: how can you make money by giving software away? Why did IBM de-emphasize AIX, after spending Billions, in favor of Linux, the product of a loose collaboration of programmers that it can never control? How can the world's greatest city trust Open Source to help manage its jails?
The Wikipedia says: Bruce Perens is a leader in the Open Source community. He created the Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. Together with Eric S. Raymond he co-founded the Open Source Initiative. In 2005, he represented Open Source at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, at the invitation of the United Nations Development Program. Today, Perens is still active in representing open source to the world and advising several national governments and multinational corporations regarding Open Source.