More and more businesses are finding unique and creative ways to utilize the open source model for both internal development and to manage strategic parts of their business. In recent years, open source use was limited to maintaining an “internal SourceForge.” But today, companies such as Google are allowing developers to work on whatever project interests them most at the moment. And on the open sourcing front, while companies such as Qualcomm are successfully following the traditional model and open sourcing software products such as the email program Eudora, other companies are getting more creative. For example, Yahoo is opening the code to their email program with the hopes that users in the community will start developing applications to run on top of Yahoo Mail. They are hoping that Yahoo Mail can have as many different applications as Google Maps does. Others, such as Netflix, are opening up their biggest problems to the open source community. In Netflix’s case, this is the ability to automate movie recommendations to clients. Netflix is asking users for help developing an algorithm that would be key to their business. They are also rewarding handsomely for it. Come learn how to use the open source model in a way that works for your business, whether it is engaging the community in a key aspect of your business or invigorating your developers by giving them some of the same motivation that caused the open source community to develop Apache in their free time.

Stormy Peters joined OpenLogic from Hewlett-Packard (HP) where she founded and managed the Open Source Program Office. As an early adopter of open source. Stormy was responsible for HP's open source strategy, policy and business practices. She was also a founding member of HP's Linux Division. 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 OReilly conferences. She has addressed the United Nations, European Union and various U.S. state governments on open source software. Stormy is a co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation, which is based on open source principles to encourage the development of a computing platform, comprised of free software, for use by the general public. Stormy joined HP ten years ago as a software engineer in the Unix Development Lab after graduating from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science.