One of the curious things about the success of open source and the Internet is that the economic benefits have often been captured by other parties than those who developed the software. Internet Service Providers built a multi-billion dollar industry providing free software services (TCP/IP, Bind, Sendmail, Apache-based web hosting) to their customers; Network Solutions captured the directory services revenue implicit in the domain name system; Yahoo!, AOL, and other successful websites captured the revenue from the open source explosion that fueled the web. Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, Cisco, Intel, and IBM sold picks and shovels to the miners. A big change in the open source culture is the attempt of open source software developers to capture some of the value that results from their own work.

Tim O'Reilly will be joined by Brian Behlendorf, president of the Apache Software Foundation and CTO and founder of Collab.Net, and Hal Varian, Economist, and Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at University of California at Berkeley for a discussion of this topic.