Sunday, February 25, 2007

[Pub] AOSSS Conference

Two weeks ago I had two talks at the 8th Asian Open Source Software Symposium. It was quite interesting for me to watch this conference, as it showed a significant trend for Asian countries (not only Indonesia) to try to follow a strong Open Source policy. Interesting was the statement of a representative of a big American GIS company with strong Microsoft background: they ran into significant prob lems in Japan ("they are not talking much about open source, they are doing it"): e.g., it appears to be government policy in Japan, that Windows servers are not allowed behind firewalls. Hence they had big problems in installing their GIS backend-server, as this one was only running on Windows, and they discussed a lot of complicated workarounds. Meanwhile, they have an open source system that also runs on platforms like Linux.

However, this was just one impression, but a symptomatic one. I personally spoke about the ECDL/ICDL as an option to bring basic IT education (also in the OS environment) to a country like Indonesia and in my second talk about the connectio of the OS development process and modern economic strategies. This leads from the assumption, that Software becomes more and more a commodity towards new software production and "consumption" patterns with a new role that users play in the game.

Maybe check out my presentation and give some feedback...

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