Neelan Choksi - VP, Americas, of Interface21 - will be speaking at Enterprise Open Source Conference 2007, being held 25-27 June at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Before Interace21 Choksi, founded SolarMetric, which was acquired by BEA Systems.

At BEA, Choksi led the effort to open source the technically heralded Kodo product as the OpenJPA project. Now at Interface21, he aims to capitalize on the Spring Framework's tremendous popularity by broadening the company's product portfolio. As a small start-up, Interface21 has developed a large, loyal community around the Spring Framework and Spring Portfolio projects.

"Venture capitalists have invested millions in open source companies and large vendors like IBM and BEA have spent millions of dollars attempting to crank up their marketing machines around their open source projects. In general, these efforts have not resulted in successful communities," says Choksi.

In his session he will explore the characteristics that all successful open source communities share as well as unsuccessful open source projects and how these characteristics are changing over time.