Arsenal Of Democracy: What Open Source Can Learn From the Motor City

The presentation discusses the parallels between open source software and manufacturing, and how lessons learned by automakers in the last century can benefit software development today. It also highlights potential pitfalls made by industrialists that should be avoided.

• Standardized builds following an exact predefined process have not been common in tech, but progress is being made with projects like In Toto and the Sig store project
• Standardized metrics and real-time monitoring can help identify problems sooner
• Outsourcing can be a major problem for industries, and it's important to be flexible and take inventory often
• It's important to keep up with the times, but some changes are not always good
• Open source has the power to democratize vast opportunities presented by technology in the 21st century

The Detroit automakers were completely taken aback when Americans started buying Japanese cars on mass. They understood already that there was a niche market for certain German manufacturers, they understood why people were buying Italian cars, but they were totally surprised that people were starting to buy Toyota all of a sudden.

Most of us will spend most of the conference learning what's new in the cloud, focusing on developments from the last six to twelve months and discovering what our colleagues are working on in the future. In this talk, we'll break from that paradigm to ground ourselves by taking a look at Detroit's history and the lessons we can learn from its dominant industry. Shane will describe parallels between open source software and manufacturing, explain how lessons learned by automakers in the last century can benefit software development today, and point out potential pitfalls made by industrialists that we should seek to avoid.