On Wednesday Linux Australia, OSIA and Baker & McKenzie presented the first Open Source Forum. I have to say I’m pretty proud of this event 🙂 Quite some time ago, particularly during the whole “Free” Trade Agreement research Linux Australia was doing I realised something quite scary. In Australia there is no differentiation between that which is good for ICT in Australia, and that which is good for the Australian ICT industry. IE – what is in the best interests of the ICT players in Australia is not necessarily in the best interests of the _Australian_ ICT players. I realised that a lot of legislation, and industry practices have been directed by large multi-nationals, some of whom play dangerous software patents games, some of whom participate in anti-competitive practices beyond belief. I felt and still feel that the Aussie companies are not always considered properly, and often assume that organisations such as the AIIA act in their best interests, even when the AIIA has perhaps one Aussie company represented on their board. Anyway, issues such as software patents are relevant to both open source and proprietary companies, in fact any person or company who is creating software.
So how does this relate to the Open Source Forum? I thought it would be great to take topical issues, present a diverse _range_ of views on the issue, and then give people the mechnism to have the discussions that are currently not happening. For our first Open Source Forum we used Software Patents as our topic. We had legal, practical, industry and developer perspectives represented, giving the participants several points of view to take home. It was a great success, with nearly 100 participants, and excellent feedback. I’m hoping we can see more SME and developer representation, as they are the particular groups who need to become educated in these issues. Thanks very much to all the presenters, and to Baker and McKenzie for hosting the event.
I’m looking to run these every two months. The next one will likely be “Linux on the Desktop”, and we’ll have a few vendors as well as solutions providers to see the vendor spiels and realities of implementation. See you all there! I’ll try to get a bigger venue to cater for the demand, so if anyone wants to participate, sponsor, or help support this event, please contact me – pia at linux.org.au. Rock on Australia!