This document discusses collaboration between free and open source software projects. It describes how individuals and organizations have built bridges between projects through both technical and non-technical cooperation on common problems and shared values. Some examples of cooperation include federator projects in the 1990s, inter-project cooperation since the 1980s, and various free software events since 2000. In 2005, the Freedesktop.org foundations list was started to facilitate cooperation, and now has over 50 member organizations and around 140 individual members.

1. Bridges Between Projects:
Collaboration Between Free Software Projects
You Probably Don't Know About
Dave Neary
RMLL 2008 2 July 2008,

2. In the beginning...

15. Hackers love a good fight

16. Journalists love a good fight

17. Journalists love a good story

18. Reality?

19. Technical co-operation
http://flickr.com/photos/annawiz/216265013/

20. Non-technical co-operation
http://flickr.com/photos/conner395/2170153872/

21. Common problems
http://flickr.com/photos/vgm8383/2482555985/

22. Shared values
http://flickr.com/photos/anjin/2081401315/

23. Distributions
1993-1998

24. Federator projects
1981- present

25. Inter-project co-operation
2000- present

26. Events
+ FOSDEM, LinuxTag, Solutions Linux, OSCon,
LCA, SCALE, RMLL, ...
2000 - present

27. +
2009 - ?

28. Foundations list
at
freedesktop.org
http://flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/221827536/

29. Genesis
2005 Merchandising

30. First meetings
OSCon 2005
EurOSCon 2005
FOSDEM 2006
Average of 3 face to face meetings per year

31. Members
>50 organisations ~140 members
http://flickr.com/photos/cyron/10813776/

32. Members
(old list – February 2007)
Dojo Toolkit Mozilla Foundation Zope
the Perl Foundation the Linux kernel CPAN
the Python Software Foundation Subversion Squeak
the Apache Foundation Ubuntu Debian
SPI Benetech GAIM
FreeBSD OSGeo Jabber Foundation
The GNOME Foundation PostGres Classpath
OpenWengo Wikipedia NLNet
Scribus OpenOffice.org Blender Foundation
Drupal Eclipse OSAF
OSU OSL GNU JSP JXTA
Typo3 Creative Commons Darwin
Smalltalk Joomla! CLUE
Mozdev.org KDE eV
Gentoo Fedora
Fink

33. Greatest hits
 Trademarks & licencing (GPL, copyright attribution,
trademarks, trademarks & copyright interaction)
 Employees (should we hire an Executive Director?)
 Governance (role of unelected officers, online voting)
 Should we create a non-profit?
 Money and community (developing a revenue model for
our non-profit/how best to do community grants?)
 Organisation infrastructure (conferences, bank
accounts, donor management software, D&O insurance)

34. Individuals build bridges

35. Conversations are the
raw materials

36. Thank you!
Questions?
http://flickr.com/photos/khardy/55867082/