Larry Augustin, Chief Executive Officer, SUGARCRM, Inc., Founder of VA Linux, Launched SourceForge.net
Presentation: Commercial Open Source for the Enterprise

Biography: Larry Augustin is an angel investor and advisor to early stage technology companies. He currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Appcelerator, Compiere, DotNetNuke, Fonality, Hyperic, Pentaho and SugarCRM. One of the group who coined the term "Open Source", he has written and spoken extensively on Open Source worldwide. Worth Magazine named him to their list of the Top 50 CEOs in 2000. From 2002 to 2004 he was a Venture Partner at Azure Capital Partners. In 1993 he founded VA Linux (now SourceForge, NASDAQ:LNUX) serving as CEO until August 2002. While CEO he launched SourceForge.net and led the company through an IPO in December 1999.

Joe Brockmeier, Open Source Software Writer, Editor and Community Manager
Presentation: The Next 10 Years of Software Freedom - Impact of Web Applications, Mobile Computing, and 'Cloud Computing'

Computing is changing at a rapid pace, but is the open source community keeping up? The computing models that open source evolved around and enabled have changed the game for users and organizations deploying and contributing to free and open source projects. Free-as-in-beer services, computing resources that lie outside the organization, and the computer in your pocket are all changing the way that we interact with and think about computing. OSI-approved licenses may not be enough to protect software freedom or preserve communities, much less attract new contributors.

Biography: Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. Brockmeier is also a FLOSS advocate and participates in several projects, including GNOME as the PR team lead.

Greg DeKoenigsberg, Senior Community Architect for Red Hat, former chairman of the Fedora Project
Presentation: Open Source Projects, Educational Opportunities

Open source projects provide vast opportunities to engage students in meaningful and productive work. From computer science, to technical writing, to marketing, to law: open source communities need help in all of these areas, and students have proven their ability to have impact in each. There are barriers to unlocking these opportunities, and we will examine these barriers and discuss how they professors can help overcome them for the benefit of students and projects alike.

Biography: Greg DeKoenigsberg is Senior Community Architect for Red Hat. He is a former chairman of the Fedora Project, an open source software development community with over 13,000 volunteer contributors. He serves on the advisory boards of several open source advocacy organizations, writes about open source issues, and speaks at open source events worldwide. He has been with Red Hat since 2001.

Nate Oostendorp, Product Director for SourceForge at GeekNet Inc
Presentation: The OSS Forge Ecosystem: Today and Tomorrow

SourceForge was founded in 1999 to offer free tools and hosting for Open Source developers. Since then, this market for OSS development hosting has seen several entrants with a wide variety of business goals and models for collaboration. In addition, many other web-based tools are in active use by the open source community, and the spread of technologies such as cloud computing continue to drive down costs for developers to build their own custom collaboration environments. Given these forces, the current suite of forges are under intense pressure to continually adapt and upgrade their offerings in order to remain an attractive place to start an open source project. What is the future of the OSS Forge Ecosystem and what does it mean for SourceForge, OSS developers, and the research community?

Biography: Nate Oostendorp is Product Director for SourceForge at GeekNet Inc, coordinating the efforts of its developers, UI designers, support engineers, and management. He started working on SourceForge in 2001 as its sole PHP developer, and then as Software Architect in 2005. Previously, he was a co-founder of Slashdot.org, the "News For Nerds" tech news site, and created the online communities PerlMonks.org and Everything2.com. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Hope College and a MS in Information Science from the University of Michigan. Most recently, he has become deeply infatuated with the open source Arduino embedded computing platform, and the open source RepRap 3d printer.

Andrew Updegrove, co-founder and partner of the Boston law firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP
Presentation: The Future of F/OSS: Questions, Challenges and Opportunities

The reality of "free and open source software" has come a long way from its early days as a movement informed as much by ideals as by technical aspirations. Today, many of the largest technology companies in the world have made significant strategic commitments to open source, and dedicated enormous investments in supporting it as well. Along the way, the community concepts first articulated by Richard Stallman have become legally instantiated in a wide range of sophisticated licenses. During those same years, the original concept forked, resulting in two complementary, but philosophically and legally distinct paths: free and open source software ("FOSS"), provided under licenses that include obligations to give back to the community, and open source software (OSS), made available under terms that allow unfettered commercial, proprietary implementations. But in each case, only now are these licenses being tested in the courts. As the development and use of F/OSS continues to proliferate, many questions and challenges lie ahead. Until they are, F/OSS development and uptake will not become a truly mature industry. These include: What best practices, legal agreements and organizational structures will best support the needs of those who use as well as create F/OSS? Should governments favor F/OSS in any way? Should individual owners continue to retain ownership in their individual lines of code, notwithstanding the resulting complexity for all concerned, or should a simple acknowledgement of authorship suffice? Can the marketplace continue to cope with such a large number of often incompatible license agreements? Will the ideals of the FOSS movement continue to peacefully coexist with value-neutral practices of OSS development? Will the patent system be reformed in such a way as to make F/OSS development more practical? Will the patent licensing business model (a/k/a "trolls") continue to flourish and spread? And perhaps most importantly, will restrictive licenses such as the GNU General Public License (versions 2 and 3) be reliably enforced by the courts around the world?"

Biography: Andrew Updegrove is a co-founder and partner of the Boston law firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP. In 2005 he was elected to the board of the Free Standards Group (FSG), and in 2007 to the Board of Directors of the Linux Foundation, where he also serves as Director of Standards Strategy. The Free Standards Group, a nonprofit organization that combined the efforts of both the open source development community and major IT vendors, was formed to develop the standards needed to prevent the fragmentation of Linux (and other key open source software) in the way that destroyed the interoperable value of UNIX. The Linux Foundation is the product of the merger of FSG and Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), and provides a range of support services to protect and promote the further development of the Linux ecosystem. He is a current member of the Board of Advisors of Open Software for America, an advocacy group promoting the use of free and open source software by the U.S. Federal Government.