Welcome to the Future of Open Source Forum

Welcome to the Future of Open Source discussion forum.

Well over a decade ago, in my operating career, Open Source presented itself as a solution to a critical development deadline for one of my engineering teams. I was inspired. Little did I know at the time how significant a moment that was.

Shortly thereafter, upon entering the world of Venture Capital, I was determined to support Open Source Software development by seeking out and investing in the best and brightest potential people behind it.  And yet as I began that work, I quickly found a deep gulf between those who were driving the OSS  movement and those attempting to learn from and work with it.

So I arranged “The Great Open Source Debate” to bring this into focus. See picture below of some of the OSS leaders of the the day, like Marten Mickos of MySQL, John Roberts of Sugar CRM, Kim Polese of Spikesource, Bob Gett of Optaros  and Billy Marshall of rPath. They debated with 6 top CIOS on the future for Open Source adoption. It was a fun start and further encouraged us to create an enduring program.

So each year I've worked with Open Source leaders and pioneers like Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical, Dries Buytaert of Acquia / DrupalJohn Lilly of Mozilla, Ron Hovsepian of Novell, Roger Burkhardt of Ingres as well as many others to look ahead to the future issues and opportunities for the industry. Guided by our annual survey, we've presented our views in the keynote session at OSBC. And now with this forum we're literally opening the thinking and discussion up to the community at large.

So 5 years later, North Bridge is once again proud to be sponsoring the annual Future of Open Source survey in conjunction with ComputerWorld, with more than 25 leading OSS industry collaborators. There have been thousands of participants and we welcome you to join us and take this year's survey here

Last year we also encouraged a series of articles and blogs from our collaborators around their vision for the future of open source in whatever domain they represented. The response was so overwhelmingly positive, that this year, thanks to Acquia and Drupal Gardens, we’re proud to present this microsite to bring together this year’s thought leaders to present their latest perspectives. These are linked here.

We hope you’ll both enjoy, participate in, and hopefully shape with us at North Bridge, the Future of Open Source.

Michael Skok

The Great Open Source Debate!

The Great Open Source Debate