Enterprise Open Source Adoption at BT, London

Kris Buytaert — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:24:10 +0000

Last monday some Inuits quickly crossed the channel for a day of speeches and talks regarding Open Source and its Adoption, the event organised at BT brought together a mixture of techies, legal persons and management to listen to and discuss about the current state of Enterprise Open Source adoption

The short introduction was done by JP of Confused In Calcutta , who mainly introduced Mark "I`m from outer space" Shuttleworth. Mark keynoted about Ubuntu .. he talked about Aubergine being the new Brown ... ranted (as everybody) about the Cloud , talked about a stronger focus to services rather than product building , talked about the ecosystem of "people close to you" for supporting solutions .

Steve Bouch, of the Synapse Project at BT discussed ao the decisions they had to make, the varialbes they took in to account when starting
to use Open Source , discussions such as the reputation of the project, the internal skill zet, the ease of importing and exporting data in and
out of the project, and the different license terms were covered.

Andrew Katz , legal guy , who's also working on the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review gave an overview of the legal impact of Opensource . We learned that his customers have similar questions as ours, such as when to publish the code, what code to publish, when to look for alternative licenses etc

There was avid discussion regarding the Affero GPL license and using Open Source as a key component to build your killar webinfrastructure while not contributing back etc.

During the pannel discussion questions like Software Patents, and the fact that Ubuntu One won't be fully Open Source were tackled For us , most of the event was confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do, And that is worth a lot !

Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - bt

Enterprise Open Source Adoption at BT, London