Keynote @ FOSS4G NA 2019

Last month I was invited to give a keynote talk at FOSS4G North America in San Diego. I have been speaking about open source economics at FOSS4G conferences more-or-less every two years, since 2009, and I look forward to revisting the topic regularly: the topic is every-changing, just like the technology.

In 2009, the central pivot of thought about open source in the economy was professional open source firms in the Red Hat model. Since then we’ve taken a ride through a VC-backed “open core” bubble and are now grappling with an environment where the major cloud platforms are absorbing most of the value of open source while contributing back proportionally quite little.

What will the next two years hold? I dunno! But I have increasingly little faith that a good answer will emerge organically via market forces.

If you liked the video and want to use the materials, the slides are available here under CC BY.