Toronto Open Source Conference Report

derrickoswald writes "Today's Ottawa Citizen is running a report in the TechWeekly section on the recent open source conference in Toronto organized by U of T's interdisciplinary Knowledge Media Design Institute and last month's Real World Linux trade show. It highlights the extremely poor Extremadura region of Spain's success story using open source to bootstrap themselves technologically. Quotes from FOSS luminaries include: 'Who controls the software, controls life. Well, it had better us. That's the real political meaning of the free software movement,' said Eben Moglen. Open source 'was the default way you built Internet Infrastructure. You wrote code and released it without trying to commercialize and monetize it,' said Brian Behldendorf." Newsforge (also part of OSDN) has a series of reports on the conference: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

"Extremely Poor" Extremadura?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man, I'm sure the average salary of a resident of the Extremadura province is still higher than someone living in Arkansas.

Spain is not a third-world country. It's one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Which is way the terrorists hate it.

Re:PowerPoint?

[Emunix]

Yeah... all of our conference spaces at U of T are equipped with XP and PowerPoint and I doubt our techs were going to bother switching for the conference when they'll need to load XP and PowerPoint again for summer section professors who are used to PowerPoint.

Quotes on "controlling" things

[Apostata]

'Who controls the software, controls life.' - Eben Moglen

'He who controls the spice, controls the universe!' - Baron Harkonnen, Dune [imdb.com]

Re:Gasp...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I shouldn't really comment since I don't live there or anywhere close by, but according to encyclopedia.com [encyclopedia.com] Extremdura "is poverty-ridden, with poor communications, absentee landlordism, and steady emigration."

Re:"Extremely Poor" Extremadura?

[YrWrstNtmr]

Not knocking Spain (I lived there 3 years and LOVE it), but with an average income ~70% of the EU average, and Extremadura being the poorest region of Spain, and unemployment running at near 30% [are-regions-europe.org], 'extremely poor' might well be a valid descriptor.

However, they did win a 2004 European Regional Action Award [eu.int] with their GNU/LinEX [linex.org] project.

Hopefully, more projects like this will help them boost their economy.