Today and yesterday I specifically aimed to meet and interview a number of sponsors and companies attending OSCON. My big quest I’d assigned myself was to determine who was doing what, where, when, and why in the Open Source Community. Of course I wasn’t going to get to every company, but I was going to try. Here’s what I got accomplished:
The big news from the HP Crew, in addition to the other zillion open source efforts they have going on, is that they’ve signed on as a partner with OpenStack! So more great news for that effort and bringing a standardized software stack to cloud computing! Getting HP signed on is one more big step toward this goal.
Even though I’ve mentioned HP first, I’m actually going to have a follow up dedicated entirely to HPs efforts in open source software. Stay tuned for that this weekend!
Heroku's New Laptop Location!
Heroku was there handing out the swag, which won them the much coveted space on my laptop! I spoke with the team there, and there are rumblings of some great things, additional tooling stacks, and other ideas. Keep an eye on Heroku, not to much to mention right now but they have some awesome things coming in the near future.
ForgeRock, Simon Phipps, and Open Source for America
Hanging Out With the OSFA Crew (I'm the 2nd one from the right, ok, I'm actually the one on the right 
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After speaking with HP I was introduced to the Open Source for America attendees. The Open Source for America, or OSFA, is setup to advocate, educate, and encourage open source software use within Government. They have the very important goal of educating political leaders and decisions makers that open source, not closed source, is much more aligned to providing their mission of liberty, freedom, and return for the citizens of the United States. The ideas, free market of software, and parallels of knowledge transfer within this software industry more closely meet the values that are intended within most civil representative Governments, which I agree totally, in this groups efforts!
Simon Phipps
While talking to the OSFA Team I was also introduced to Simon Phipps, who writes for Computer World UK, tweets as @webmink, blogs as webmink, works as CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) at ForgeRock, for full creds check out his LinkedIn Profile, and as he identifies himself, “Software freedom activist, transparency activist, blogger, photographer, writer”. I only spoke to Simon for a few minutes, but we covered some good ground, and must say Simon is one interesting character and a good person to know!
ForgeRock, being a company I’ll admit I knew nothing about until Simon told me about them, is doing some absolutely great work. Their lines include:
- OpenAM - OpenAM is the market leading open source Authentication, Authorization, Entitlement and Federation product. ForgeRock provides the community with a new home for Sun Microsystems’ OpenSSO product.
- OpenDJ - OpenDJ is a new LDAPv3 compliant directory service, developed for the Java platform, providing a high performance, highly available and secure store for the identities managed by enterprises.
- OpenIDM - OpenIDM is an open standards based Identity Management, Provisioning and Compliance solution.
