Danese Cooper
Ms. Danese Cooper is the founder and chair of InnerSource Commons. Previously, she worked with the Irish company NearForm as VP Strategic Initiatives. Prior to joining NearForm, Ms. Cooper spent 4.5 years as Sr. Director and Head of Open Source Software at PayPal, Inc. She was the inaugural Chairperson of the Node.js Foundation. Ms. Cooper previously served as the CTO of Wikipedia, as Chief Open Source Evangelist for Sun and as Sr. Director of Open Source Strategies for Intel. She concentrates on creating healthy open source communities and has served on the Boards of the Drupal Association, the Open Source Initiative, the Open Hardware Association and has advised Mozilla and the Apache Software Foundation. She also runs a successful open source consultancy which counts Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, SETI Foundation, Harris Corporation and Numenta as clients. She has been known to knit through meetings.
Session
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it sure doesn't feel like that if your project gets disrupted by another FOSS project. FOSS is one of the best ways you can work to make a better world, but the launch of a new project that runs parallel to one you've worked on for years can be really disheartening. What if they're piggybacking on your brand to get halo from your project? The Right to Fork is great, but what if they're better funded or sucking up all the funding you used to rely upon? This talk will discuss how to evaluate a parallel project launch and strategies you can employ to make sure your project doesn't falter in the face of unexpected competition.