Phil tells the tale about a farmer named Raymond and the issues he runs into when given a “truckload of free topsoil.” Those issues are similar to the same problems and burdens that come with free code. “Some of them may be quickly obvious, like big rocks, and others might take a little more time to find, like smaller rocks. The most insidious are the latent ones, lurking like germinating weeds…” To read the full posting click here.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, will kick things off with a keynote about the growing opportunities OSS presents for businesses of all sizes – especially in lean times like now and for the near future as the economy stumbles toward recovery.

Immediately following Jim’s keynote, I’m honored to be participating in the keynote panel discussion on The Future of Open Source. Moderated by Michael Skok, General Partner at Northbridge Venture Partners, OSBC planners have assembled a terrific panel of open source leaders, including Larry Augustin (SugarCRM’s CEO and commercial OSS pioneer), Dries Buytaert (CTO and co-founder of Acquia and founder of one of the most dynamic OSS communities in the world – Drupal) and Jim Whitehurst from Red Hat as well. We’ll be engaging in a spirited discussion on open source adoption and where the industry is headed in the coming years. We’ll also be discussing results from the “2010 Future of Open Source” survey. (The survey is still open for you to add your perspective.)

Day two of the conference is also chock full of exciting speakers, panels and break out sessions, including a keynote from Facebook’s David Recordan on scaling Facebook with OSS and the keynote panel – How Open Source Drives a $1.2 Billion Market – featuring Jean Staten Healy from IBM, Director of Cross-IBM Linux Strategy & Marketing.

I’ll be leading a breakout session at 3PM on March 18th called Mixed Fuel for Innovation: Development Trends Blending Open Source with other Code – Who, What, Why and How (in the Strategies for CIO/CTO Track). I’m fortunate to have Addie Welch, VP of Legal Affairs, at Zenoss joining me in this session. We’ll be sharing some real world examples and case studies of innovative companies gaining a competitive advantage with the strategic use of open source software.

I’ll also be participating on a breakout panel hosted by Paula Hunter, the new Executive Director of the CodePlex Foundation, discussing Multi-Source development and interoperability. That session is scheduled for Wednesday March 17th at 11:40AM.

Please come by, listen in, ask questions and say hello!

Bob also wisely avoids the difficult discussion of licensing issues with open source. Most developers aren’t lawyers, as he points out. Fortunately you don’t have to be – there are plenty of tools out there to uncover and easily manage the legal obligations (including Black Duck’s).  And with the abundance of open source projects to choose from, there’s a wealth of options with more permissive licenses like Apache, BSD, MIT, and others that simplify the issues around their use and integration.

When we think about open source software, we think about two things: pragmatism and abundance. It’s pragmatic to use multi-source development. It shortens time to solution, increases flexibility, saves money and lets developers do more interesting work. Abundance, a topic which Matt Asay has written about, is the secret weapon of open source: there’s lots of open source code available that meets commercial development needs.

Companies are using more of OSS all the time.  And companies are joining the OSS trend because the benefits and the resulting competitive advantages can be seen in the growing number of success stories. They aren’t so worried about the three types of software – they’re committed to getting results. Here’s to innovation through multisource (hybrid) development using open source. It’s something we can all support.

The training attendees were lawyers interested in open source and compliance. We covered the major IP issues with open source, covered the GPL at length, but also how development organizations can easily automate and ‘design in’ compliance to existing development processes. It was interesting that most of the questions from the audience were on what I’d characterize as ‘advanced’ licensing and GPL issues, e.g., what constitutes a derivative work.  However, Aaron made the point a number of times that the law suits involving the GPL are mostly about not adhering to the most basic requirement of the GPL to make source code available to users.

A few other takeaways from the training, based on a survey of the attendees, include 20% of the attendees have no open source compliance practices and 37% require vendors to provide assurances/indemnification of their code. This last point reinforces a trend we’ve seen on the part of suppliers being more pro-active to analyze their code and clean up any issues rather than relying on manual methods of verification (or doing nothing).  Pamela started the training off describing the recent Microsoft Windows 7 GPL issue where code from an outsourced developer had GPL in it that was discovered after the product shipped.  It certainly highlights the need for automated methods of checking and verification.