Announcements
Brief items
LibrePlanet forever! Watch five sessions from 2015 online
Videos for 5 LibrePlanet sessions are available, including "Stand up for the GNU GPL!" by Karen Sandler, "Free software, free hardware, and other things" by Richard Stallman, "Let's encrypt" by Seth Schoen, "Style or substance? Free software is totally the 80's" by Deb Nicholson, and "Federation and GNU" by Chris Webber.
Articles of interest
3 big lessons I learned from running an open source company (Opensource.com)
Over at Opensource.com, Lucidworks co-founder and CTO Grant Ingersoll writes about lessons he has learned from running an open-source company. "You might ask, 'Why not open source it all and just provide support?' It's a fair question and one I think every company that open sources code struggles to answer, unless they are a data company (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook), a consulting company, or a critical part of everyone's infrastructure (e.g., operating systems) and can live off of support alone. Many companies start by open sourcing to gain adoption and then add commercial features (and get accused of selling out), whereas others start commercial and then open source. Internally, the sales side almost always wants "something extra" that they can hang their quota on, while the engineers often want it all open because they know they can take their work with them."
How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms (Linux.com)
Over at Linux.com, John Mark Walker examines why companies aren't making money on pure open source ventures. "It is not that there is no money in selling open source software, but rather that the business models have shifted. Whereas, under the old proprietary world, a larger percentage of money went to pure software vendors, now that money has spread among a larger spectrum of companies and industries; lots of people get paid to work on or with open source software, but an increasing number of them don’t work for software vendors, per se. In addition to looking in all the wrong places, the current investment model is suspicious of an open source approach. The vast majority of venture capitalists, especially in Silicon Valley, are very risk averse and shy away from open source products that, in their view, will not give as large a return on their investment. In order to secure the funding required to scale a company, investors will frequently require that the startup company include proprietary bits as tools to increase revenue and margins. These two factors - diffusion of revenue and risk-averse investors - combine to both give a false impression and, in part due to the false impression, prevent pure open source software vendors from getting funding."
Calls for Presentations
CFP Deadlines: May 21, 2015 to July 20, 2015
The following listing of CFP deadlines is taken from the LWN.net CFP Calendar.
| Deadline | Event Dates | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 23 | August 22 August 23 |
Free and Open Source Software Conference | Sankt Augustin, Germany |
| May 23 | May 23 May 25 |
Wikimedia/MediaWiki European Hackathon | Lyon, France |
| May 31 | October 2 October 4 |
PyCon India 2015 | Bangalore, India |
| June 1 | November 18 November 22 |
Build Stuff 2015 | Vilnius, Lithuania |
| June 1 | July 3 July 5 |
SteelCon | Sheffield, UK |
| June 5 | August 20 August 21 |
Linux Security Summit 2015 | Seattle, WA, USA |
| June 6 | September 29 September 30 |
Open Source Backup Conference 2015 | Cologne, Germany |
| June 11 | June 25 June 28 |
Linux Vacation Eastern Europe 2015 | Grodno, Belarus |
| June 15 | August 15 August 22 |
DebConf15 | Heidelberg, Germany |
| June 15 | September 24 | PostgreSQL Session 7 | Paris, France |
| June 15 | November 17 November 18 |
PGConf Silicon Valley | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| June 17 | October 5 October 7 |
LinuxCon Europe | Dublin, Ireland |
| June 17 | October 5 October 7 |
Embedded Linux Conference Europe | Dublin, Ireland |
| June 19 | August 20 | Tracing Summit | Seattle, WA, USA |
| June 28 | August 28 September 3 |
ownCloud Contributor Conference | Berlin, Germany |
| June 28 | November 11 November 13 |
LDAP Conference 2015 | Edinburgh, UK |
| June 30 | November 16 November 19 |
Open Source Monitoring Conference 2015 | Nuremberg, Germany |
| July 5 | October 27 October 29 |
Open Source Developers' Conference | Hobart, Tasmania |
| July 15 | October 8 October 9 |
CloudStack Collaboration Conference Europe | Dublin, Ireland |
| July 15 | October 27 October 30 |
OpenStack Summit | Tokyo, Japan |
| July 15 | November 6 November 8 |
Jesień Linuksowa 2015 | Hucisko, Poland |
| July 17 | October 2 October 3 |
Ohio LinuxFest 2015 | Columbus, OH, USA |
| July 19 | September 25 September 27 |
PyTexas 2015 | College Station, TX, USA |
If the CFP deadline for your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Upcoming Events
EuroPython 2015: Come with your partners
EuroPython will take place July 20-26 in Bilbao, Spain. The organizers have announced the EuroPython Partner Program, which offers interesting tours for EuroPython attendees and their partners. The registration deadline for the tours is June 20, seats are limited.Next year's Intl. Day Against DRM: Are you in?
The FSF's DefectiveByDesign campaign reports that the 2015 International Day Against DRM was the biggest ever and urges everyone to help make the 2016 edition better still.Events: May 21, 2015 to July 20, 2015
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| May 18 May 22 |
OpenStack Summit | Vancouver, BC, Canada |
| May 19 May 21 |
SAMBA eXPerience 2015 | Goettingen, Germany |
| May 20 May 22 |
SciPy Latin America 2015 | Posadas, Misiones, Argentina |
| May 21 May 22 |
ScilabTEC 2015 | Paris, France |
| May 23 May 24 |
Debian/Ubuntu Community Conference Italia - 2015 | Milan, Italy |
| May 23 May 25 |
Wikimedia/MediaWiki European Hackathon | Lyon, France |
| May 30 May 31 |
Linuxwochen Linz 2015 | Linz, Austria |
| June 1 June 2 |
Automotive Linux Summit | Tokyo, Japan |
| June 3 June 5 |
LinuxCon Japan | Tokyo, Japan |
| June 3 June 6 |
Latin American Akademy | Salvador, Brazil |
| June 5 June 7 |
PyCon APAC 2015 | Taipei, Taiwan |
| June 8 June 10 |
Yet Another Perl Conference 2015 | Salt Lake City, UT, USA |
| June 10 June 13 |
BSDCan | Ottawa, Canada |
| June 11 June 12 |
infoShare 2015 | Gdańsk, Poland |
| June 12 June 14 |
Southeast Linux Fest | Charlotte, NC, USA |
| June 16 June 20 |
PGCon | Ottawa, Canada |
| June 22 June 23 |
DockerCon15 | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| June 23 June 26 |
Red Hat Summit | Boston, MA, USA |
| June 23 June 25 |
Solid Conference | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| June 23 June 26 |
Open Source Bridge | Portland, Oregon, USA |
| June 25 June 28 |
Linux Vacation Eastern Europe 2015 | Grodno, Belarus |
| June 25 June 26 |
Swiss PostgreSQL Conference | Rapperswil, Switzerland |
| June 26 June 27 |
Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2015 | Hong Kong, Hong Kong |
| June 26 June 28 |
FUDCon Pune 2015 | Pune, India |
| July 3 July 5 |
SteelCon | Sheffield, UK |
| July 4 July 10 |
Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre | Beauvais, France |
| July 6 July 12 |
SciPy 2015 | Austin, TX, USA |
| July 7 July 10 |
Gophercon | Denver, CO, USA |
| July 15 July 19 |
Wikimania Conference | Mexico City, Mexico |
| July 18 July 19 |
NetSurf Developer Weekend | Manchester, UK |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
