Category: Aus Community

Pancakes and FOSS – wrapup

Jeff and I are in Brisbane and tonight we had a huge turnout to come talk about FOSS and pancakes at the Pancake Manor in Brisbane. We had about 30 people all up including OSIAns, HUMBUGs, the people from the PHP meeting that was supposed to be on at the same time (but got cancelled) and some interesting individuals from Government, industry and Microsoft (gasp!). It was all in all a very fun and interesting night, and many thanks to everyone coming along!

Jeff took some great photos (and some not so great ones) that he’s uploaded to his flickr stream 🙂

Speaking at FOSSACT

Since linux.conf.au Jeff and I have basically been catching up with work and kicking off some new projects. I’m down in Canberra with some clients today and speaking at FOSSACT this afternoon about how to grow the pie for FOSS businesses in Australia. FOSSACT is kind of like a localised OSIA for the ACT. I hope to see the day when FOSSACT partners or joins up with OSIA, as maintaining a clear message of industry cohesion and maturity is important to gaining more influence and credibility as an industry. I’m looking forward to it, as there are some great businesses doing good FOSS work in Canberra, which is particularly important when you consider government is the primary client base in Canberra.

Afterwards a bunch of CLUGers will be meeting at the All Bar Nun for drinks and catch up. Come along if you are in Canberra to meet and geek 🙂

Accepting nominations for LA VP

Pia’s passion and pizzazz produce a potent prepapration for a proactive and purposeful posse. Pia is proficient at public promotion and persuading the priviliged, without being either pliant or prone to prevarication. My proposal: purloin Pia, pint-sized prodigy and PC poster-girl, as perennial VP! – AJ Towns

Best nomination post ever! Thanks AJ 🙂

Nominations for the Linux Australia election are still open, but only for a few more days. You’ll need to log in using your membership information to nominate and later to vote, so check it out!

I’ve been nominated for VP and after some serious deliberation have accepted the nomination. In 2006 I was largely unable to achieve my LA goals due to being absorbed with helping run linux.conf.au (only 3 weeks away!), however I am keen to help take LA to the next level in 2007. My pitch is below (and will show up on the LA elections page once elections open):

Linux Australia has come a long way, particularly in the last four years. I feel my efforts in jump-starting LA at linux.conf.au Perth (2003) have paid off, and with the efforts of great committees and community members, LA is now a vibrant community with many active and inspiring contributors and members. In only 4 years we have increased membership from 5 to 1200, gotten into the ears of industry and Government, brought together a largely geographically dispersed community and created a transparent and trustworthy organisation that assists its community by being a tool for community development and FOSS in Australia.

Now we need to work especially hard to take LA to the next stage. I would like to accept the nomination for VP and my aims for 2007 include: to empower our community further for growth and local representation; to get FOSS onto the agenda of Australian Government and mainstream media; to create a better relationship between the Australian FOSS industry and community; & to create a way for FOSS groups to participate freely that aren’t specifically “Linux”. This last point is really important, there are many groups out there that are part of the FOSS community, but aren’t Linux specific (eg – Perl, Python, Open Solaris), and LA needs to find a way to be more formally inclusive of non-Linux FOSS groups so we can all be stronger together.

These aims are not short term. I am committed to LA for the long haul as I see the community voice of FOSS as being especially important now and well into the future. As our entire lives become more and more digital, trustworthy and sustainable technologies are vitally important. This is an important part of my personal commitment to FOSS and LA.

I hope to serve as VP with Jon as President as I feel his well-balanced and stable leadership is complimented by my energy and connectiveness. I hope to continue to serve the Australian FOSS community, and help take us to the next stage as a strong, trusted and participatory national and community focused organisation.

GPL3 event – report

So the GPL3 forum happened yesterday in Sydney hosted by the UNSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre and supported by Linux Australia.

It was an interesting event, and a full recording will be made available in the coming week. It got an article from Computerworld which was great, and there were about 50 participants. Tridge was, as usual, utterly brilliant. Articulate, talking out the issues and benefits, and generally being very generous with his time and knowledge. There was good discussion between the panelists (although there could have been more crowd participation, I think Roger Clarke who chaired it was probably a little exclusive), and finally Eben Moglen joined us for a 45 minute phone call where he answered loads of questions. I asked him about the Novell/MS agreement and he had some very interesting things to say 🙂 I won’t try to paraphrase however when the video is available you’ll see yet another brilliant idea from Eben that works to avoid the kind of patents lock-out inherent in such deals.

Many thanks to Professor Graham Greenleaf, David Vaile and his team, in particular to Abi who pulled it all together! Also thanks to Linux Australia who with a small sponsorship ensured the event was free for anyone to participate.

GPL3 conference in Sydney

I announced a GPL3 conference being held in Sydney on the 30th November but forgot to blog it! 🙂 It is only 10 days away so register if you want to come. There will be Andrew Tridgell, Eben Moglen (via phone) and a whole bunch of people who want to know more. It is a good chance to understand the implications of the GPL3 on our community and possibly help you form your ideas for any last minute submissions before they finalise GPL3 early next year.

It should be a great event and many congratulations to the Cyberlaw centre for putting it on. Also may thanks to Linux Australia, as without their financial support, this event could not have been free for everybody to attend.

Open Source – just behind security

I’m speaking at the VITTA conference next week, which is like an ICT conference for educators. It is looking to be a great event and Donna is doing a lot of work for it, and doing a great job!

Anyway, she’s just told me my talk “Open Source: Taking education to the next level” is the second most popular talk just behind an ICT Security talk. Rock! I love it how people are starting to want to hear about Open Source, we are really getting into the minds of the mainstream!

Open, shut them…

So this is just weird. Just a few weeks ago after it was leaked that Open Source WA was going to be shut down, the WA Government backflipped denying funding issues amidst community frustration. The Department of Industry and Resources in Perth then committed to keeping the Open Source WA centre open.

Then less than a month later it is announced the Open Source WA project is axed due to “budgetary constraints”. What is going on here!

The Open Source WA centre acted as a point of education, training, piloting and experimenting with Open Source software for businesses and education. It was a free centre and a great resource. For what it is worth, the centre was very well run by Kevin Russell and his team there and I would hope it can continue to run. I would hope we would start seeing such centres in every state.