Business

Getting everyone in your company or development team on the same page can be a challenge. This on-your-feet workshop will teach fast, fun improv techniques for helping your group to bond as a team. Learn the secrets of improv-based team building from two professionals who have decades of experience working in open source, Internet start-ups and corporate training. Read more.

You’re great with programming. You can code circles around the competition. People dig your technology. But will they love your company? In this session, two geeky individuals show you how their startup has managed to build a devoted following among a customer base that’s more Peyton Manning than Perl Monger, while winning praise from people like Robert Scoble and Jeanne Bliss. Read more.

Congratulations! You have done well having been promoted to managing your team....but how do you do that? Sheeri Cabral, DB Operations Lead at PalominoDB, takes her experience managing geeks and shows how to deal with tough geek management issues -- from how to deal with problem employees to the dreaded "how do you tell an employee they have body odor?" Read more.

Most open source start-ups have some sort of lock on the code - dual licensing, contributor agreements, "open core" add-ons and more. But is it possible to start a profitable company without any of those - with just skilled people delivering expert service and developing new code in the community? I don't just think it's possible - I'm doing it! Read more.

Building on last year's presentation on starting a business based on open source software, this presentation will cover the best ways to market such a business. Read more.

Formal contributor agreements give rise to a number of social, economic and ethical problems, threatening to undermine many of the advantages of open source development, without offering any real legal benefits. Projects and their sponsoring organizations should implement explicit but informal contribution policies that are grounded in free software tradition and that encourage community-building. Read more.

A discussion of fundamental legal concepts for free/open source software developers, focusing on the topics that projects most commonly face: copyrights, trademarks, patents, and incorporation. Read more.

Free and Open Source projects are volunteer efforts but they still needs funds to pay for misc like bandwidth, hardware and the all important tee-shirts. This talk covers the basics of raising money: types of potential sponsors, choosing who to approach, how to "make the ask", special considerations for events, and some ideas on how to accept funds, including pitfalls to avoid. Read more.

The way you make your luck in Web 2.0 is through virality. Figure out how it what it really means and how to code it in your LAMP website. Read more.

This talk surveys the FLOSS copyleft compliance problems that were and are encountered, and how they have changed historically. Much progress has been made since the 1990s, but widespread adoption of GPL'd and LGPL'd software in embedded systems has led to more violations than ever before. This talk explains how our community meets these challenges to improve worldwide copyleft compliance. Read more.