Open Source Business (B10)
Bruce Wang (moderator)
Robert Scales
Kris Krug [Vancouver, yeah!]
HD
Bill Xu
Mi Jia
Robert on incorporating open source software into his business practice, and how to profit as such:
-drupal allows community-building tools, cost-effective in the long run and fast-pace always
-many communities have ideas of large communities, and drupal removes the need to build from the ground up
-the money gets made in consulting and supervising, on upcoming trends and knowing how to give them what they want
-investing money back into the community, organizing events such as Barcamp, DrupalCamp
-it’s a philosophy, redistributing the wealth, sponsoring events, creating new modules to give back to the community, and we don’t really make that much money
-Drupal community in China is rather small, his goal is to push for more ppl in China to use the platform
Kris on how open source can be good for business:
-Google’s release of Open Social api, the same day it had been integrated with Drupal, and immediately Kris was able to offer this to his clients
-another example, a client had hired him to develop a podcasting module on Drupal, took six weeks, was released on a Friday (open source), and by Monday it had been translated into both French and Spanish, and new functionality had been added, so he was able to divert this back to his customer
-Not just cheaper and quicker, you are also no longer stuck tied to a particular company (who may go out of business, or be able to do what you need…less risk)
Open source developers do it out of passion
And for software companies, finding talent, open source brings them out of the woodwork, and makes it easier to foster them
[Yikes, someone tough is running the show, it's just been announced that this panel is ending now (17:00 Sat.). I sure want to learn more about Drupal now. I really gotta give props to Catherine the translator who is not just from Guangzhou, but amazing at this!]