The Disruptive Effect of Open Source - panel debate at FWS-2010

NMI are running The Future World Symposium on 15th/16th September at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. Apart from a great line-up of international senior speakers from companies like Intel, Microsoft, O2, Freescale, Aptina, ST-Ericsson and Wind River and including UK stars such as Imagination Technologies, CSR and ARM, we’re also running a number of panel sessions, including one on “The Disruptive Effect of Open Source”. This panel, on 16th September, will be chaired by Glyn Moody who is a journalist, author and passionate open source advocate. In 2001 he published his book “Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution”.

We know that the open source business model has been used in the IT industry for a long time and has delivered some great successes for companies trying to disrupt the established order. We want to establish if there is a ‘Domino’ effect around open source adoption and are we seeing this in other sectors?

In particular we want to debate how the open source model applies within an engineering/product environment, both hardware and software, the lessons that can be learned from the experiences in the IT sector, the impact that it is likely to have over the next ten years and the indirect benefits, such as enabling ecosystems, that it brings.

More details of the Symposium are available at www.nmi.org.uk. I'm looking forward to what promises to be a great event.