Manifesto 🇪🇺
When it comes to commercial open source, we believe Europe is home to powerful, untapped potential that can transform the way corporations deploy and teams build technology.
There’s just one problem: the vast majority of economic value created by commercial open source is captured by non-European companies. This is true for both startups that are built on top of open source projects as well as large corporations struggling to strategically reap the numerous benefits of open source technology. O4B - The Open Source Business Forum is about building a lasting platform of relevant stakeholders to inspire and accelerate dialogue and action to help Europe realize its potential. O4B is about demonstrating that the European open source community is open for business.
To deliver on that promise, we are bringing together technology decision makers at large European corporations, Founders and CEOs of European open source startups and VCs who are actively investing in open source companies. The goal is to foster an ecosystem that sparks dialogue and establishes best practices and frameworks across four different areas:
- Enterprise Open Source Strategy (organizational benefits of OSS for corporations, buying decision process, involvement in OSS communities, etc.)
- Company Building (business models, product & pricing, hiring/culture, community management, etc.)
- Value Creation of Open Source Businesses (assessing/evaluating early OSS projects, OSS as GTM for the application layer etc.)
- Building the next gen of European Commercial OS Category Leaders
As a first step, we are bringing together a closely-knit community of relevant decision makers in an interactive virtual event, O4B 2020, on October 7-8, where we will host content-rich virtual workshops, panels and talks from leading thinkers in the space. There will be a limited number of tickets available. If you are interested in attending let us know here. In a second step, (most likely post-Covid-vaccine), we will host an in-person two day conference in Munich building upon our initial discussions and developing blueprints for successful European commercial open source efforts.
It is important to emphasize that, for us, O4B is really not just another conference, it is about building an enduring European community of commercial open source to allow our continent to better leverage the enormous economic value behind open source. If you would like to join that community effort, please sign-up here.
