Report from open Source Conference in Malaga
19-February-2004
permalink email thisAttendance at the Open Source International Conference, Malaga has been a
pretty even split between the hardcore OSS community (read Linux, in
particular the Debian community) and business - from entrepreneurs to
corporates alike. It is also very much a home affair, with the vast
majority of attendees coming from around Spain.
Discussion in the larger presentations and plenaries has been divided
between fundamental philosophical, political and legal debate about
notions of freedom, choice & openness and the adoption of OSS by both
corporates and governments.
Many speakers have referred to the München model and understandably much
has been made of the moves in Andalucia to ensure the general adoption in
the public sector of OSS. The possible knock-on effects on the proprietary
software industry (Ireland being cited as the world's No. 1 software
exporting economy) of widespread legislation to enforce adoption has been
noted.
Technical discussion in the main sessions is pretty much limited to either
OSS at the OS level or leveraging application software. Middleware was
given a passing mention in one contribution only so far.
Sun's approach is evangelical, taking the moral high ground over others
such as IBM, Novell and HP, also represented on this morning's plenary,
emphasising the broader view of the benefits of OSS for the developing
world - again the emphasis is either side of middleware - however they do
seem to be talking in the right direction - openness in standards,
interoperability, royalty-free patents and focussing on education as the
way forward. Again, the principle emphasis is on OSS in business use and
the economics of the transition from proprietary systems to OSS.
Unfortunately, translation hasn't been available in the side rooms where
some of the more detailed contributions have been held - including
unfortunately this morning's e-learning session, but I've managed to get
hold of the transcript disk this morning (these had run out before I
reached the registration desk yesterday...)
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