HamsterJam, ApacheCon, and building businesses out of Apache Software License

Just thought I'd check in from ApacheCon EU 2009 in Amsterdam. This definitely one of the most engaging conferences I've had the good fortune to attend. Yesterday I gave a one day workshop on building web- and RESTful services using Apache CXF, showing also how to plug in the JMS transport into CXF so that you can do XML/JMS or SOAP/JMS from JAX-WS code. I was blessed with a really good audience, which made for a fun day. Had an interesting scrape though: throughout the day my MacBookPro kept on 'freezing' out of the blue! Not the kind of thing you want when you're doing live-coding: took me eight hours to figure that this was happening because I'd left my bluetooth mouse on in my bag, and it was periodically taking control of my machine whenever it could make a connection. Ouch!

Today I broke with my usual tradition of doing technical talks to join the business track, where I got to follow up after a great panel discussion with my own talk, Adopting Open Source in the Enterprise (follow the link to pick up PDF of the slides). I also really enjoyed Paul Fremantle's talk on building business out of Apache Software License, which agreed with my own observations on the need for ASL-based business to give real business value in terms of their support, services, training and consulting. In my own talk I had talked about Ricardo's Law of Competitive Advantage, and how organizations will support themselves in their adoption of open-source unless a vendor - like Progress with FUSE - can demonstrate that they can provide that support cheaper, better, faster than the organization can do themselves. For me, a vendor offering services around Apache-licensed community software acts as a 'mountain guide', helping users to get most value out of the commons code while minimizing risk.

Right now I'm in a talk by Andreas Gies (a colleague from Progress) who has such great experience in adoption open source for distributed team development. He's a Maven committer, and, in my eyes, an absolute legend. Go Andreas, Go!