It has been a huge week. We went down to Yass for the break on the 22nd and on the 23rd I had some excellent meetings in Canberra. Firstly I met with Michael from the National Archives of Australia. The stuff they are doing with Open Source is incredible. Firstly they have one of the nicest server rooms I’ve ever seen, complete with a robot sweeper that knows when to recharge itself. They get all the fun toys! They also had some amazing SAN technologies and were running several operating systems including of course a couple of versions of Linux 🙂 The most interesting part of what they are doing there is a digital preservation application they have written and GPLed called Xena which is of course on sourceforge. Xena is a world first application for proper digital preservation and management and is very smart. The NAA say in their documentation about Xena that proprietary data formats are the greatest risk to the ongoing preservation and accessibility of electronic data, and thus Xena is built completely on open standards, including of course the OOo document standards. The Xena data preservation process is roughly as follows. First they quarantine the data, to ensure it doesn’t have viruses in it, ensuring it is safe and such for about a month updating the anti-virus app daily. Then they transform it to open formats, and finally they store it in multiple repositories to ensure redundancy that is cross hardware and cross platform. Anyway, it was great to see the project and what they are up to. I’m looking forward to seeing their case study to be presented at Linuxworld in March at Government Day, which isn’t yet announced but will be in a couple of weeks. Hurrah!
I had forgotten to mention a very cool story from the Open Source World Conference in Spain late last year. Some of my Brazilian friends Fabs Balvedi and Marcelo Branco, who are wonderful people working on FOSS in Brazil showed me a fantastic video called “Cultura Digital” about the creation of FOSS music labs in Brazil created for the youth to express themselves. Also on the site is a music video with Stallman performing alongside Brazilian music god Gilberto Gil, who has also been a political activist in his time and is now the Minister for Arts in Brazil. Anyway, pretty awesome stuff. Check out the computer case graffiti being done in the Cultura Digital video. Thankyou Marcelo and Fabs for showing me, I look forward to returning to Brazil, which is certainly one of my favourite places in the world 🙂
Last but not least, the planning for Linuxworld Conference and Expo is going well. We have a finalised main conference outline, some great exhibitors at the trade show, and Government Day about to be announced. I’m personally pretty excited about this event, which will be the first Open Source business and Government focused event in Australia. Getting the word out has been hard as people automatically assume Linuxworld is the same as linux.conf.au, which shows how strong the LCA branding has become, but nevertheless, they have very different audiences. If you know managers, C level people, policy makers and generally anyone in the business or Government community looking to understand the Open Source opportunity, send them to Linuxworld. It’ll certainly help them understand the market, understand the opportunity and understand that they are missing out, if they are not already using FOSS and building concise FOSS strategies. The aim of the conference is to grow the industry and help educate our business/Gov community about FOSS.