What Everyone Should Know About Open Source (SFBAY ACM) July 18, 2007

Open source is an important software development methodology. It can also be an important part of business strategy. In this talk Ron Goldman, a Sun Microsystems researcher, will describe how open source works and discuss why a company might want to participate. He will touch on open source business models, building community, licensing, and common mistakes.
About the Speaker

Ron Goldman is a researcher working at Sun Microsystems Laboratories on alternative software development methodologies and new software architectures. He is currently a member of the Sun SPOTs team that is investigating using Java on small embedded, wireless devices. He was instrumental in defining the vision and details for the java.net website and helped start the Javapedia project. He has advised various Sun open source projects including NetBeans, OpenOffice, and Jini. He is the co-author of the book Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy published in April 2005 by Morgan Kaufmann.

Before joining Sun, Ron developed a program to generate and manipulate visual representations of complex data for use by social scientists as part of a collaboration between NYNEX Science & Technology and the Institute for Research on Learning. He has a continuing interest in the design of programming languages and has developed various programming environments (IDEs). He has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University where he was a member of the robotics group. His research interests include autonomic computing, biologically-inspired computing, collaborative computing, open source, programming languages, software robustness and user interface design.

Official Website: http://sfbayacm.org/events/2007-07-18.php