This conference aims at:

• fostering anyone who would like to create, sustain and transfer an OSS project from his laboratory to the industrial world in a more productive manner;

• helping start-ups and companies to find answers to overcome Open Source “constraints” within their environment and better understand the OSS culture;

• enabling academia and industrials to meet, talk together and find synergies between research projects and industrial needs;

• providing a free expression room where OSS Academic, Research and OSS Start-up's team can present their projects;

• showing the benefits of the participation in a collaborative network, with the purpose of increasing the value of academic results, gathering them in a common environment and releasing them in Open Source.

fOSSa Philosophy

Open source can be seen as a development, collaboration, distribution, marketing and disruptive innovation model that has gradually fostered the building up of a new collaborative way of working in the R&D domain often evolving towards the creation of an organised community. Furthermore, the increasing connections at the international level raise a need for remote collaboration around the world that emphasises the need to organise the creation, promotion and sustainability of such projects.
Open Source model has proved its efficiency in addressing this new way of working. Nevertheless, launching an Open Source project, developing it and maintaining it successfully is not always a spontaneous action, since it relies on a structured approach and requires good knowledge and practice of the Open Source culture.

The history of F/OSS can be traced back to academic origins: distributing source code under a permissive license was the de facto rule in academia in the 70's. Since then, F/OSS became a wide spread paradigm throughout the software industry, and its alignment with academic goals tended to be forgotten. According to fOSSa steering committee members, software innovation is a value creation process that needs a new joint collaboration of industries, academia and F/OSS experts. 

By organising such conference, we hope to clarify the Open Source model and culture.

fOSSa audience

The fOSSa audience mainly focuses on academia and research centres but it does not close the door to industrials, since in many cases academia needs industrials and vice versa: we believe that Open Source model can improve this kind of collaboration in a much more natural way.

fOSSa first event

The fOSSa conference 2009 is our first conference organisation. There are missing topics like OSS and Development... We tried to do our best (in a very short time frame) to propose an interesting and consistent program for Acamedia and Industrials around our passion: the Open Source Software Model. We promise to improve the overall conference for the next occurance :-)

fOSSa thankful words

The fOSSa conference proposes real valuable presentations around Open Source. We are proud that Jean Luc Archimbault (CNRS), Roberto Di Cosmo (University Paris VII), Clément Escoffier (Apache & Google Android), Luc Grateau (INRIA), Bob Gobeille & Bruno Cornec (HP Fossology), Arnaud Laprévote (Mandriva), Ralph Mueller (Eclipse), Pascal Prevot & Alban Richard (Sun Microsystems), Jean Bernard Stefani (INRIA), Cédric Thomas (CEO of OW2 Consortium) and many others, participate in the fOSSa conference adventure. They accepted on a very short abstract! We thank them for trusting us.

Finally, we have located this conference in Grenoble as we believe in decentralised conference location, giving the chance to come to this event even to those people who can't travel to Paris. In the OSS domain, Rhones-Alpes region is full of resources!

Finally, we would like to thank all our sponsors Engineering, SUN, Ville de Grenoble, OpenSourc3, INRIA (D2T) team and OW2 ELC team for organizing such a nice event and for supporting us!

Conference where Open Source meets Academia