Evangelism Reps Training Program/Talks/posscon
“Is open still enough?” – Keynote at Posscon 2013 at Columbia, SC
In the open source world we know why we put our time and efforts into the larger goals we try to achieve. We successfully showed that the barriers and lock-ins of the past don’t hold up in the test of time and got even the enemies of old to release their code. This made us lax and we can be seen as hard to talk to and deal with. We seem to have quite a strong lack of empathy for people who don’t “get” open and our behaviour can lead to a lot of opportunities to go wasted. Times change and the new mobile computing world and closed app markets give end users an incredibly alluring world of simplicity – a world that is built on lock-in, afford-ability and making the user the product. A world that the open alternatives to date can not match when it comes to simplicity and shininess. Mozilla, amongst others, is battling this change by offering a truly open alternative called Firefox OS. In this keynote Chris Heilmann will show how open can still win the minds and hearts of the main market and what we as an open source community can do to avoid the future to be behind shiny and yet sturdy bars and locks
