About OSA COM

OSA COM is a community of open-source practitioners and evangelists specific to the Analytics space (in its broadest sense). We bring together open-source project leaders, practitioners, patrons, and supporters in order to energize, connect, and support this community. OSA COM is organized around a set of principles laid out in the Manifesto below.

Once a year, we organize OSA CON, a virtual conference where we showcase the best open-source projects, discuss technology trends, and help projects connect with users and supporters.

Why join OSA COM?

Open-source software is one of the most influential movements in the history of computing. The impact on analytic applications has been profound. Pioneering open-source projects supply the building blocks of analytic processing: event streams, data pipelines, data warehouses, visualization tools, and many more. Open-source licenses and communities have unleashed a wave of creativity that enables insights for millions of users worldwide.

Yet it’s not all peaches and cream. Many vendors see open source as a marketing tool or use bait-and-switch license changes to create proprietary moats around open-source software. Modern cloud-native design fragments software into separate projects, leaving users with a massive (and expensive) integration problem. Project creators face roadblocks to create businesses that are economically viable while upholding commitments to open-source users.

The time is ripe for a new developer community to promote a balanced open-source ecosystem that benefits all who create and use analytic software. We are announcing OSA com to fulfill this mission. Our community is based on three core beliefs.

• That the building blocks of analytic systems should be distributed under open-source licenses that uphold the basic freedoms to use, understand, change, and distribute source code.
• That the value of open-source analytic projects lies in their individual quality as well as their ability to integrate into stacks to solve important user problems.
• That there should be a vibrant marketplace of products and services for open-source analytic software based on the principle of competition between vendors on a level playing field, not proprietary barriers to entry and monopoly pricing.

OSA com will build from our successful OSA Con conferences, which attracted over 2000 registrants in 2023, to create a year-round community that fosters open-source analytics. Here are just a few of the ways our community will help.

• Provide a forum to learn about existing open-source analytic projects.
• Promote new projects based on emerging technologies like AI that will transform the cost, speed, and scope of analytic systems.
• Share success stories of industrial analytic systems based on open source.
• Explore how to integrate open-source projects into stacks using modern CI/CD and runtime environments.
• Promote sustainable business models and showcase vendors who enable users to utilize open-source analytics effectively.
• Build collaboration and partnership across the myriad individual communities of open-source projects.
• And, of course, continue to build OSA Con conferences as a unique source of information about all facets of open source analytic development.

Our community will model the same governance we treasure in open-source projects. We pledge to build an organization that is simple, open, and operated in the interest of all community members.

We know from the popularity of OSA Con conferences that thousands of developers share our belief in the power of open source to enable innovative analytics. It’s time to act. Join our quest to shape a vibrant ecosystem that benefits all participants for decades. And long live open source!