BT Open Source Open For Business Conference
Early last year BT Group Chief Technology Office organised a day long open source conference at our research campus just outside Ipswich. At this point I’d been with BT for just over a year, but it was the first time I’d had the opportunity to meet with colleagues from across the business who all shared one thing in common: a passion for open source. It was a memorable day, informative and served to bring together many like minded people.
Following on from this event a pan-BT Open Source SIG has met around once a quarter. And via this the opportunity presented itself to get involved in organising this year’s event, which was held at BT’s city headquarters. Not needing to be asked twice I seized the opportunity and got involved with event planning and arranging speakers.
We were very fortunate to have a keynote from Doc Searls - co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and Senior Editor at Linux Journal. In his inimitable style Doc explained how the Net is the biggest example of open source, happened despite businesses and indeed at the objection of many. He enlightened us to the Because Effect, and with precision articulated why technology infrastructure - the buildings blocks of the online world - must be open source. He likened these blocks to elements in the periodic table, and suggested that to claim patent on these would be akin to claiming you owned say carbon, or even gravity or the colour red.
After Doc we had the analysts view from Laurant Lachal, Open Source Research Director at Ovum. Following this we were treated to an excellent presentation from BT’s very own Mark Kent - a man with an incredibly lucid vision of how open source fits into the enterprise. I’ll likely blog about some of Mark’s ideas in the future as I’m sure he won’t mind, he doesn’t blog himself (heaven knows why not!) and they need to be shared.
The Open Source Consortium’s Mark Taylor presented a number of case studies next, under the title ‘UK Open Source - the Market Reality’. This is an area Mark has a great deal of experience in, not only through his OSC engagement but also through being CEO of a respected open source consultancy: Sirius. Next up a presentation from Doug Levin of Black Duck Software on Open Source Licensing and Management in the Enterprise. And then a presentation from Osmosoftonian #1 Jeremy Ruston, who’s talk was titled Starting an Open Source Project. But the subject matter covered was much wider than this and included things such as good and bad reasons to start an open source project. A memorable example cited of the latter was along the lines of: CTO - “We don’t have enough developers… let’s open source the software!” and the elves will come and do the work… Plainly not a good reason nor likely to result in great success for any of the parties involved.
After lunch Adriaan de Groot explained to us how the KDE project manage quality in a code base of some 6 million lines of code. No small feat! And then Quim Gil from Nokia/Maemo/Gnome talked about the Maemo project and working with open source at Nokia. It was a great talk, and Quim passed around a prototype of the Nokia N810, which is truly a thing of beauty.
After Quim’s talk a panel took questions, and this was made up of the speakers, British Computer Society Open Source Specialist Group Chair Paul Adams and Rob Taylor of Codethink.
In the auditorium foyer we had demonstrations from: Osmosoft (TiddlyChatter on One Laptop Per Child’s XO, and TiddlyWiki on Wii), BT Group CTO (Jonathan Mitchener with GNU Radio and a USRP, Gary Bruce with CallWeaver, and Cefn Hoile with BT Rules), and the BT Beta team - to name the ones I can remember! During registration, coffee breaks and over lunch attendees could visit the demonstrations, have a chat and not only see open source in action but witness its diversity.
I’m really looking forward to the next Pan-BT Open Source Event, and suspect (hope) it will be less than a year from now.
You can find some more photos from the event here.
Image (top): Doc Searls
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