The Stack

Presenter: JT Smith

Description: Every open source application needs to include its prerequisite stack right in the download, but most open source developers believe in the UNIX shared libraries concept. In this presentation, you'll learn why this is usually a terrible practice, and why it will ultimately keep most open source apps from dominating their markets.

Using a few simple guidelines outlined in this presentation, you can make your application more appealing to a wider audience, make it work on more platforms, make all deployments more robust, and dominate your market even over competing closed source applications. All of the knowledge shared was gained by going through this process twice, with two very large open source applications: WebGUI (Perl) and the Business Integration Engine (Java). So learn from someone who has faced the pain, and come out on top. Learn from my mistakes and successes.

Topics Covered:
1. How a prerequisite stack affects your users and potential users.
2. How a prerequisite stack affects stability.
3. How a prerequisite stack affects deployment to new platforms.
4. When to use or not use operating system packagers.
5. Automated installation and update mechanisms.
6. Choosing what goes into the stack.