(I’d hoped to be blogging along while in Washington, but never got around to it; next time, Tony, we need a conference place with wifi!)
IDGs (and Infoworlds) top news story today: Open source debate heats up at conference. The conference they talk about (but for some reason don’t name) is the eGovOS conference in Washington, which ran this week.
The conference has confirmed to me that I’m all for open source. Especially for the developing world, but also for the so-called developed world. Open source is a cornerstone in the globalisation process, basically. Bruno Lanvin of Infodev closed the conference by concluding that open source is about giving the developing world a fighting chance.
The key is to create a level playing field, not only for the various software vendors on our markets, but also at a metalevel, between ideas and concepts, emering and consolidated technologies, and big and small players.
Bruce Perens’ talk was excellent and right to the point:
Bob, if you’re going to call for choice and fairness, it should
be a sincere call, not a sham. Don’t put on a program that calls
interoperability a too-expensive option. Don’t claim that keeping
software patents out of standards and interfaces hurts the little guy
when it does just the opposite.
Bob is of course Bob Kramer, the executive director and vice president of public policy for CompTIA, Initiative for Software Choice which I wrote about earlier.
Although the Perens-Kramer-et al panel was an absolute hit, there were generally good and interesting contributions, from literally all over the world. Here a but a few intersting cases:
- Rhode Island Rules and Regulations of Procedure offering a Rules Tracker giving users advanced personalisation features; backend system to be GPL’ed.
- http://www.oss.gov.za / is an excellent resource!
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