This week both Donald and I are at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC West). Steve O’Grady already blogged on his impressions of yesterday’s events.
For those that have never been to an OSBC, it is a fairly unique show. There are basically equal numbers of lawyers, venture capitalists, software entrepreneurs and technology consumers. With a few token adventurers from the larger open source communities thrown in for good measure. My only criticism of the event, which I also plan to make in the panel I’m on this afternoon is that with all the talk about open source business models, the one that seems to get ignored at this event is probably the biggest one of them all: namely, those companies that make a business out of commercially adopting open source technologies from the larger communities such as Apache and Eclipse. The focus here seems to be entirely on those start-up firms that are building single community open source projects/products like SleepyCat, SugarCRM, MySQL, etc. Not that they don’t deserve the attention, but I don’t think that they represent the only “open source business” model out there.
I am curious to hear from companies out there in the Eclipse ecosystem as to why they decide not to participate at OSBC. I don’t mean necessarily as exhibitors, because the lack of developers here makes that pretty obvious. But there are clearly some interesting and successful businesses being built on top of the Eclipse technology whose stories are not being told here. Why not?
