Marc Fleury, Founder of JBoss, will present about “Making a Business out of Open Source” at the CERN this coming Monday. This guy is quite a funny and disruptive character (he once referred to the Apache crowd as a bunch of fat ladies drinking tea among other things) who built a company despite heavy skepticism about open source in the early days of the movement.

I really wish I could be there on Monday but I will still be in Seoul. Anyway, feel free to contact François Grey on francois.grey@cern.ch if you wish to attend (free).

Practical details below:

Speaker: Marc Fleury, Founder of JBoss

Topic: Making a Business out of Open Source

Time and Place: Monday 16th April 14:00-15:00, CERN Council Chamber

Abstract: Marc Fleury, a physicist by training, retired in his thirties after selling the company JBoss, which made an open-source application server, to Red Hat. He will talk about the various business models of open source software. From leveraging available open source software and casual contributions, to on-ramp models and subscription models, various business models have been explored and function. Not all models work for all software fields and business types. He will review those business models in context and survey “state-of-the-art” economic models for open source software production.

Speaker Bio: Marc Fleury is the creator of JBoss, an open-source Java application server.
Fleury holds a degree in mathematics and a Doctorate in physics from the École Polytechnique in Paris and a Master in Theoretical Physics from the École Normale. He worked in France for Sun Microsystems before moving to the United States where he has worked on various Java projects. Marc’s research interest focused on middleware, and he started the JBoss project in 1999, and went on to found the JBoss company with his wife Nathalie. JBoss became a corporation under the name JBoss, Inc. in 2004. After selling his company to Red Hat in 2006, Fleury became Senior Vice President and General Manager of the JBoss Division. On 9 February 2007, his departure from Red Hat was made public. He is currently pursuing other personal interests, such as teaching, research in biology, his family, and doing gigs as a techno DJ in the Atlanta area.

Bonus link: a very interesting 2005 interview of Fleury where he gives a hard look at the open source market.

LIFT et Nouvo, le magazine multimédia de tsr.ch a le plaisir de vous inviter à son débat public. Son thème: “Internet: vers une information personnalisée jusqu’à l’émiettement?”:

Internet a bouleversé le monde des médias. L’arrivée des sites personnalisables, permettant aux internautes de se construire leur page d’accueil sur mesure, est en train de modifier en profondeur la consommation d’information. Ce changement est-il positif? Est-ce la fin des “grands médias” rassembleurs? Le début d’un émiettement de l’information?

Les orateurs:

• Pierre Chappaz. Fondateur de Wikio, moteur de recherche d’informations dans les blogs et les medias et Codirecteur de Netvibes, portail personnalisable
• Stefana Broadbent. Ethnologue, travaille pour Swisscom à l’étude des nouveaux modes de consommation et de communication
• Claude Monnier. Journaliste au sein du groupe Edipresse, il a été rédacteur en chef du Journal de Genève et directeur du Temps stratégique

Venez participer au débat le mercredi 4 avril 2007 à 18h00 à la Salle Michel Soutter (entrée TSR), 20 quai Ernest-Ansermet, 1205 Genève.

L’entrée est libre mais l’inscription obligatoire. Pour vous inscrire et obtenir plus d’informations à propos du débat et des intervenants: www.nouvo.ch/debat

After Mark Shuttleworth last week, the CERN is bringing another world class speaker to Geneva: Sir Robin Saxby. If you are interested to attend, contact severine.pizzera@cern.ch and ask for a (free) badge.

Speaker: Sir Robin Saxby, Chairman of ARM and President of IET.

Time and Place: Friday 9th March 14:00-15:00, CERN Council Chamber

Title: Chips with Everything

Abstract: In this talk, Sir Robin will discuss the history of the Microchip Industry in parallel with ARM’s history, demonstrating how a small European start-up can become a world player in the IT sector. He will also present his vision of important applications and developments in the next 20 years that are likely to become even more pervasive than the mobile phone is today, and will provide anecdotes and learning points from his own experience at ARM.

See you there.

Update: Time and Place: Wednesday 28th February 14:00-15:00, CERN Council Chamber

The CERN is organizing a conference with a fascinating speaker: Mark Shuttleworth. The guy’s bio feels like a Scorcese movie:

• started as a developer on Debian (an operating system).

• founded Thawte in 1995 (a company specialised in digital certificates and Internet security), sold it to Verisign for $575 million.

• turned to business incubation and venture capitalism.

• he then formed a non-profit organization dedicated to social innovation.

• on April 2002, he became the second civilian cosmonaut.

• in 2004, he returned to the Linux world by funding the development of a user-friendly distribution of Linux, Ubuntu.

And in 2007, he will give a speech at the CERN about “Open Source Software: The Challenge Ahead”. Worth the trip probably!

This just in: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to make historic joint appearance at the fifth annual ‘D: All Things Digital’ conference.

That was the goal I had set for LIFT (as I told to Le Temps earlier this year), put both of these guys on stage for an hour to discuss the revolution they started. I guess I will have to find another goal now, Dalai Lama and Bill Clinton?

Anyway, don’t even try to register for D5, it’s sold out (and the price was a hefty 4’000$).

Live video is available here, and Nicholas Negroponte is about to take the stage. The conference opened with a weird panel about the “future’s future” with Caterina Fake (Flickr) and Niklas Zennström (Skype etc…). Not sure such a title is a gift as it is hard to deliver the magic it promises.

As usual I won’t bother posting my notes about the discussions happening here, but simply point you to Bruno’s blog.

I am in Munich to attend DLD06DLD07. After a windy flight (I definitely HATE flying) I ended up touring the city for a few hours this afternoon before coming back to the hotel to catch up with my (exploding) mailbox. I hope to be able to enjoy the discussions that will go on despite the intense rush I have to deal with for LIFT.

Marissa Mayer, Luc Besson, Norman Foster and Bruce Sterling are here among others. Bruno Giussani (who is on the board of DLD just like it seems he is on the board of every single conference on this continent) told me the organizers had the best problem you can have, i.e. trouble fitting all these amazing people in the program.

I can’t sit at a conference and not try to find a few lessons to bring back to my own gig. I was at Le Web 3, a conference that had some highs and now well publicized lows. Here are the few thoughts I gathered:

• 1000 people aren’t that bad
I always thought that going above 500 (the number of seats we have at LIFT this year) was a bad idea. It’s not that bad after all. 1000 people didn’t feel like too much, and you could pretty much bump into anybody you wanted to meet. I guess that, more than the number of attendees (below a conceivable level), continuous presence is more important than anything. That is why we ask the LIFT speakers to be with us for the whole conference and not leave right after their speech.

• Food is really important
Period. I am upgrading the traiteur order for LIFT as we speak.

• Flat is a two-sided concept
The world is flat we say. Lesser-known speakers should be treated like rock star speakers. When someone is on stage, let them finish their sentence even if a former prime minister enters the room. The big guys can wait 2 minutes. Respect is a bidirectional thing.

• Star speakers are a double-edged sword
Le Web and LIFT get a lot of attention these days as the “higher” spheres of business and politics start to acknowledge the influential nature of bloggers, innovators and entrepreneurs. Get a big name and the cameras move in! Yes, our ideas are getting mainstream coverage! But a potentially constructive situation might very well turn into a look-at-me-I-am-the-only-politician-speaking-to-this-cool-crowd-I-don’t-care-about.

• Conference organizer is a low profile job
And you better be ready to live with it. Many think my job consists in booking plane tickets and hotels, while I actually see myself as the editor in chief of some sort of giant brainstorm. It is frustrating, and I am not even talking about the easy critics you invariably get. So there is a temptation to strive for more visibility, to show up on stage and try to be on the pictures. The problem is that attendees don’t come to see me but the result of my work, and I have to live with it. I think a conference brings enough indirect returns that you should forget the direct ones.

Update: here is Shimon Peres video

Update 2: the blogosphere is on fire. These politicians are a double-edged sword: they bring a lot of attention, but they might end up stealing the soul of the show.

Some people are just flying over the pack. You are at a conference, sitting in the middle of great talks about your daily life and work. Then one guy steps on stage and blows you away.

Photo by Adam Smith

I am usually very skeptic toward politicians – they don’t have time to scratch below the surface of what technologies are doing for all of us – but some are not where they are by chance, and seem to have a special capacity to inspire, and make you will rejuvenated with words.

Peres did just that. He gave a high level view of what technologies, and more specifically the Internet, are doing to change the world. He is a great storyteller, mixing personal experiences and pearls of wisdom gathered around the globe. He just made all of us in the room feel like we can change the world with our keyboards. True or not, some people will probably find a new energy to pursue their projects and start making a difference.

Loic managed to create more than a cool event. Le Web 3 just turned into a special event. Being a fellow conference organizer, I feel very thankful for what is happening now. And thanks to Pascal for getting me a ticket!

I was at Barcamp last month to see how these 100% self-organized conferences work. It was a great experience, and I took some notes about this original format:

Barcamp was an amazing experience. I hope we can build on top of that and integrate this concept in LIFT.