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What Makes Open Source Work: Licensing and Beyond

Event: All Things Open 2026

Location: Raleigh

Dates: October 19, 2026 – October 20, 2026

Presentation: October 19, 2026

Link: On event website

Speaker: Peter Farkas

The term “Open Source” typically refers to the license a project uses, but is having an Open Source license sufficient for a project to embody all the values commonly associated with Open Source Software? Perhaps not.

In this talk, Peter looks at what else decides whether a project is worth adopting for the long term: availability of binaries, quality of documentation, governance structure, community size and activity, and other criteria that matter once you move past the license file. If you evaluate open source for production use — or maintain a project yourself — this is a sharper set of questions to ask.

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What Makes Open Source Work: Licensing and Beyond

Speakers

Peter Farkas

Peter Farkas

Peter Farkas is a seasoned open source leader with over 15 years of experience building sustainable open source projects and businesses. He currently serves as the CEO of Percona, a global leader in open source database software and services.

Before joining Percona, Peter was the Co-Founder and CEO of FerretDB, the truly open source MongoDB alternative that enables developers to use MongoDB drivers seamlessly with PostgreSQL as the backend.

Peter is a strong advocate for open source solutions, believing that they can drive innovation and sustainable growth on par with-or beyond-proprietary software.

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