Tom "spot" Callaway
Tumbling down the open source rabbit hole with a set of floppy disks to install Linux on his dorm room computer in 1996, Tom has been happily contributing to FOSS projects ever since. He spent 19 years at Red Hat in a wide variety of roles (support, sales, release engineering, Fedora Engineering Manager, Open Source Academic Outreach in the CTO's office) before joining the Open Source Strategy & Marketing team at Amazon Web Services. He was the Fedora Legal liason (but not a lawyer) for 15 years, and was a primary author for the initial versions of the Fedora Packaging and Legal Guidelines. He still maintains several hundred Fedora packages, most notably, R, texlive, and chromium. He co-authored an O'Reilly book called "Raspberry Pi Hacks" once, but that was when the Raspberry Pi 1 was cutting edge. In what remains of his spare time, he enjoys science fiction, comic books, traveling, gaming (board, video, whatever), pinball, geocaching, puzzle solving, craft beer, and Transformers. He is based in North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, two boys, and a cat.
Session
It is often difficult for open source community members to understand why large companies do the things that they do with, around, and for (or against) open source. In this session, I will share some insight into the strategic decisions that these companies often make when it comes to their engagements with open source. I'll cover some of the reasons (good and bad) that companies open source their own software, and explain some of the motivations behind their behavior in existing open source communities.