As previously mentioned, I attented the SDForum meeting on The Future of Commercial Open Source earlier today. Jonathan Schwartz was a no-show and John Markoff was replaced by Larry Augustin at the last minute. Nevertheless, Tim O’Reilly’s insight on open source, as reported by Sam Ramji, and the audience made of a who’s who of commercial open source made for a very productive morning. We were told not to blog about the content of the meeting itself, but proceedings should be made available by the organizers soon. In the meantime, Steve Larsen published fairly detailed minutes on Krugle.

Following a review of the GPLv3 Draft by Mark Radcliffe, we split in six working groups and were asked by Luke Hohmann to imagine how open source will evolve between now and 2010, using a method called Remember the Future and invented by enthiosys. I found the approach very effective and will try to learn more about the other Innovation Games developed by Luke’s consulting firm.

The meeting concluded by a presentation by Doc Searls, who drew a controversial analogy between the software industry and the construction industry. Doc highly recommended the reading of How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand and Tim O’Reilly signed copies of Open Sources 2.0. Instances of both are finding their way to my mailbox and I shall provide reviews in future posts.