Our Vision

Improve lives with open source.

Our Mission

• Outreach to educate about benefits derived from open source.
• Promote open standards.
• Promote interoperability.
• Provide a safe place for newcomers to learn.
• Help people find gainful employment.
• Support open source communities, projects, foundations, and start ups.
• Help educators be more effective.
• Help companies, communities, academics interested in open source to connect.

Practical things we do

• Provide free events that teach skills using open source.
• Provide free online videos that teach skills using open source software.
• Organize paid events and sponsorship opportunities to subsidize the free activities.
• Facilitate open source related networking and colaboration between industry, academia, and government.
• Offer course material to assist Colleges and Universities to teach using open source.
• Aggregate news and event feeds from other open source projects and communities.
• Support research and internship projects using open source.
• Promote international connections between projects and institutions.
• Provide infrastructure, governance, and energy to promote development in our ecosystem.

See our Frequently asked questions page

Where we fit in the Universe

An important part of what we do is to provide education and outreach. A significant number of people have never heard of open source and thus are unaware of the potential business benefits open source can provide. Some of these benefits include faster time to market, shared risks, promoting innovation, lower costs, shifting investment from commodity to unique value, reduced transaction costs between partners, and more.

There are successful organisations that support a particular project or groups of projects. For example, the Eclipse Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, or Open Source Geospatial Foundation. We help newcomers get involved with these groups and others by teaching the basic skills and norms they need to know.

The aim is to get participants started so they know where to go to learn more on their own. FOSSLC goes beyond foundation technical skills to help attendees understand open source culture, businesses models, and provide a place to network.

History

OSBOOTCAMP was founded in January 2008 by Andrew Ross to create a place where newcomers could get started with open source. In 2008, OSBOOTCAMP held 12 events internationally. OSBOOTCAMP has continued to grow organically through the efforts of great volunteers, educational institutions, and sponsors. In late 2008, the FOSSLC non-profit was created to build on the successes of OSBOOTCAMP, offer additional transparency and neutrality to supporting organisations, and enhance the quality of our brand image.

Why open source?

Open Source Software (OSS) gives the user the right to the source code, right to freely redistribute, the right to modify and derive from the source, and more. (see here for more)

OSS is a powerful force for change in technology and business. Here are a few quotes from industry:

"80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010", and "Open source is not a niche play or a fad; it is in the mainstream and here to stay" - Gartner (2007)

"Open source software represents the most significant all encompassing and long-term trend that the industry has seen since the invention of the fundamental data storage architectures and SQL APIs in the early 1980s. IDC believes that open source will play a role in the life cycle of every major software category at some time and that open source will fundamentally change the value proposition for packaged software for software customers.” – IDC (2006)

“The other disruptive innovation is open source. Open source reached the tipping point in the last year. For most user organizations the question is not whether they will adopt open source but when and where. What started as an idealistic movement has become far more pragmatic and commercially-minded.” – Ovum Research (2006)