December 8th, 2009 NCLUG Meeting

[James DeWitt]

Hi NCLUGers,

What: December 8th, 2009 NCLUG Meeting
When: Tuesday December 8th, 2009, 6pm
Where: College America, 4601 S Mason St, at Harmony (map at nclug.org)
Food afterwards: South China (next door)

Presenter: Stormy Peters, GNOME Foundation

Topic: "Would you do it again for free?"

  One of the things about the open source community that continues to
  baffle those non-open source people is, "why do you do it?"  Open
  source developers work on open source software for a number of reasons
  from scratching an itch to gaining a reputation to building a resume to
  contributing to a good cause.  The interesting problem comes when money
  enters into the equation.  Research shows that when someone works on
  something for free (for internal rewards) if you start paying them you
  replace those internal rewards.  Then if you stop paying them, they
  will stop working on it.  Does that hold true for open source
  software?  Are commercial companies killing open source by paying
  people to work on it? How should commercial companies work with the
  open source software community? 

Bio:

  Stormy Peters is Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. She joins
  the GNOME Foundation from OpenLogic where she set up their OpenLogic
  Expert Community. Previously, Stormy worked at Hewlett-Packard (HP)
  where she founded and managed the Open Source Program Office that is
  responsible for HP's open source strategy, policy and business
  practices. Stormy joined HP as a software engineer in the Unix
  Development Lab after graduating from Rice University with a B.A. in
  Computer Science. Stormy is a frequent keynote speaker on business
  aspects of Open Source Software at major conferences such as the Open
  Source Business Conference and the O'Reilly conferences, as well as
  government organizations such as the United Nations and the European
  Union. Stormy is involved in GNOME and free and open source software
  because it is changing the world and the community is full of smart,
  passionate people! 


See you there!


James DeWitt