Now that Mac OS X gives Apple a foothold (or at least a toehold) in the open source arena, Mac developers and some users may be interested in the upcoming Open Innovation conference to be held July 31 to Aug. 1 at the Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, CA. Jef Raskin, author and one of the creators of the Mac, will be speaking at the event.
Open source is a term for the historical development model used by the Internet community to facilitate distributed development of complex, high-quality software. The basic principle is to involve as many people as possible in writing and debugging code, by publishing the source code and encouraging the formation of a large community of developers who will submit modifications and enhancements.
Open Innovation is sponsored by Open Country, a provider of commerce, distribution and management solutions for open source applications. Michael Grove, CEO for Open Country, said the event will “bring together the industry’s leading thinkers, developers, investors and entrepreneurs to explore the issues and opportunities for new software directions and debate the business models needed to support growth.”
Nolan Bushnell, CEO and Founder of uWink, an entertainment network company, will deliver the keynote address. His is a name familiar to long-time computer users as the founder Atari. Bushnell also founded 19 other companies during the past 25 years — he’s currently on the Board of Directors of such companies as Wave Systems, TradeWorld, and Webquest.
Conference sessions and topics include: Market Interests are Best Served by Open Innovation; Open Source Commerce — Leaping the Barriers; Business Models for Open Innovation; The Art of Innovation; The Humane Interface; Integrating Open Source into the Enterprise; Open Source Investment; Global Directions for Open Source; and Incremental Maturity or Accelerated Innovation.
Besides Raskin, other speakers and presenters include: Arthur C. Clark, author and space age expert; Mark Gorenberg, partner, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners; Tom Kelley, general manager, IDEO; Larry Lessig, author and Stanford professor; and Bruce Perins, open source advocate, Hewlett-Packard.
The conference fee is US$295 for registrations completed by July 17 and $395 for those registering after that date. Individuals interested in attending can register online.
Apple’s open source projects include Darwin, the core operating system of Mac OS X and the Streaming Server, which runs on a wide variety of platforms. The list of open projects is available online.