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OSCON Resignationcascade_event

milestonebiographyopen-sourceresignationfotango
2007-07-27 · 1 min read · Edit on Pyrite

Overview

At OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) in July 2007, Simon Wardley resigned from Fotango on stage during his keynote speech. He had planned to announce the open-sourcing of Zimki under GPL v3, but Canon Europe's board blocked the release. Rather than deliver the planned talk, Wardley declared it his "last talk for Fotango" and resigned publicly.

Context

Wardley believed that utility computing required open standards and open-source foundations — that the evolution of computing toward commodity/utility status demanded openness, just as other commodity utilities (electricity, water) operate on shared standards. Canon's board disagreed, viewing Zimki as proprietary technology.

Aftermath

Canon Europe ceased all funding of Fotango within days of Wardley's resignation. Zimki was shut down on Christmas Eve 2007, ending one of the first public PaaS platforms.

Significance

The OSCON resignation is a pivotal biographical event for several reasons:

  • It demonstrated Wardley's willingness to act on his convictions about evolution and commoditization, even at personal cost
  • It provided a dramatic illustration of organizational inertia — Canon's inability to see the strategic logic of open-sourcing a utility computing platform
  • It echoes themes from Boyd's biography — the iconoclast who chooses principle over institutional comfort ("to be or to do")
  • It marked the end of Wardley's practitioner phase and the beginning of his transition to researcher and public intellectual

    • Sources: The Register (2007), "Fotango COO quits job during keynote speech"

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    Links to

    Fotango Simon Wardley Inertia