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.

So let me get this straight...

[Power Everywhere]

Open Source software is about controlling life? I wonder that was what RMS was really thinking.

PowerPoint?

[Anonymous Coward]

PowerPoint was required
Behlendorf led off with a comment that he is not used to PowerPoint -- the presentation software of choice for the conference, which is running Windows XP -- and apologized in advance if the PowerPoint requirement caused him to slip up, because he said he is used to the OpenOffice.org variant of the software.

Any idea why PowerPoint/XP were chosen in the first place, seeing as it's an OpenSource conference?

Wow

[Curtman]

• Free software -- software that can be freely copied, modified, and re-distributed by its users (and often software which is free of charge) -- is inextricably bound with personal freedom, the loftiest speakers say.

I'm shocked. Printed media that actually described free software properly. Props to Ottawa Citizen.

Whoa

[Short Circuit]

Matusow went on to make a point about Red Hat's corporate Linux licensing, saying that Red Hat has a per-CPU licensing scheme with an auditing clause in the contract, and that client companies could not modify the (GPL'd) code for risk mitigation reasons on Red Hat's part.

Either that's a "damn lie," or Red Hat has some explaining to do on the part of restricting GPL'd code.

Re:PowerPoint?

[Cecil]

Because, while the people with PDF files, OpenOffice presentations, and such were mostly amenable to either converting them to PowerPoint, or simply using their own computers, the majority of the presenters could not/would not use anything other than PowerPoint.

Remember that people from all walks of open-source life were at this conference, including Microsoft's manager of their Shared Source initiative, government officials, non-technical people, even people who were basically arguing against F/OSS.

Still, the irony did not go unnoticed. I heard all sorts of people mentioning it with varying levels of amusement.

Of course, it seems relevant to note that without exception, the very best speakers did not use any presentation software at all. Some of them, Dr. Moglen included, didn't even have notes.