foss-north happened last week, for the first time with me as the main organizer, taking over from Johan, who’s blogged about it already.

I didn’t get to take many photos myself, but I think the conference was a success; speakers were happy, visitors were happy, and everything went according to plan. I am relieved that it is over, but also excited about planning for next year’s conference.

Next year’s foss-north will be on April 27-28th.

Importance of FOSS

Probably preaching to the choir here, but it’s worth repeating what Daniel said in his talk about cURL:

96% of commercial code contains Open Source

Firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist

Yet, most spend little or no money on maintaining och contributing to open source software. I believe we can do better!

So, what can you do? A non-exhaustive list:

  1. Contribute to FOSS, by upstreaming patches, improving software you’re already using, and so on.
  2. Contribute financially to projects you’re using. Maintenance is often done in somebody’s spare time; helping out financially could enable the maintainers to do more.

Sponsoring and joining events such as foss-north is also a good thing, since it enables a place for FOSS users and developers to meet up, and some of the money we get from sponsors and tickets goes to supporting speakers with travel costs etc. We have had to cut speakers from the conf for financial reasons before, and it’s never feels good.