Floss News & Articles

If your company or project is heavily involved in the open scene (open source, open data, open government, etc) then one conference you may want to consider for 2010 is the Open World Forum (news, site). Not only do you get a chance to hobnob with people working and thinking hard on how to further drive openness on many levels, you get to do it in Paris.

Forget Paris in the spring. Do it in the Fall this year, particularly if you are involved, interested or even vaguely curious about open source software.

That's because in October, the second Open World Forum with the Open Source Think Tank will take place in Paris and bring together the key global players in the Free, Libre and Open Software (FLOSS) community.

Conceived as a ‘meeting point’ where industry movers-and-shakers, community leaders, politicos and CIOs could all bang their collective heads together, this year’s event will focus on FLOSS as one of the key drivers in the development of the digital industry.

The Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) world is rich in content. But it can be a little scattered, and can be confusing for those public and private organizations who want to wade in -- especially when it comes to long-term planning.

The 2020 FLOSS Roadmap, licensed under the Creative Commons (BY-SA), hopes to address this issue.

Version 1 was developed by 31 experts and released in December 2008, and contains:

1. Predictions on how the FLOSS ecosystem might evolve over the next ten years
2. Recommendations on how to both encourage FLOSS growth and leverage its benefits
3. In-depth studies on topics such as public policy, technological innovation, uses and employment

The 2002 FLOSS Roadmap version 1.0, provided by the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap

Roadmap v2 Needs You

The 2020 FLOSS Roadmap team is now ready to work on version 2 for release this fall, and they're ready to open discussion to the wider FLOSS community.

If you want to get involved, go to the Roadmap and start by reading the Roadmap Theme documents (see below)  for those areas that interest you. Then, annotate the documents with your comments. Instructions for how to annotate are displayed in each Theme's section.

Current Roadmap themes include:

1. Public policies: promoting sustainable development of shared resources
2. FLOSS: the key to future innovation and competitive differentiation?
3. Ensuring sustainability for FLOSS developer communities and business ecosystems
4. Technological and economic breakthroughs: challenge or opportunity for FLOSS?
5. IT 3.0: towards new governance for information systems?
6. FLOSS: a lever for employment and careers
7. FLOSS in an Open World: Innovations and best practices from Brazil

Helping organizations understand FLOSS -- where it's going and how to make the best use of it -- can only accelerate FLOSS adoption. Hopefully this project ultimately provides yet another way to make a difference.

Come on down...become a participant.

As the best-known free software and open source license, the GNU General Public License, or GPL, has become both a rallying point for the free software and open source (FLOSS) communities and a focus of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) campaigns for those who fear that these movements will destroy their revenue streams.

Let's take a look at some of the issues and misunderstandings that get in the way.

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