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Why can’t we be friends: Do corporations and FOSS really mix?

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The current problem space that both community members and companies have for using & supporting FOSS, and some arguments & solutions to help increase your company’s engagement with the community.

Speakerdeck PyCon US 2016

Many folks in the Python community appreciate and contribute to Free and Open Source Software. But sometimes, your employer may not be on your side.

There are a lot of things that we can all agree with respect to what the FOSS community would like to see companies do. From the small things, like being more polite when interacting with volunteers and writing high quality bug reports, to the more expensive and time consuming things like employing maintainers of software you use or donate significant money.

However, it requires a lot of work to get your company to move in this direction. You need to have good, solid arguments and employ smart strategies. In this talk, we build on the experiences we have from working with Free Software inside Spotify and recount lessons learned. We also look at other well-publicized examples of organizations engaging with the FOSS community and help provide strong arguments for persuasion.

This talk was presented with Noa Resare at PyCon US 2016 and ApacheCon 2016.