Category: Government

Linux Australia “cover girl” ;)

So I recently did a casual interview with Liz Tay from IDG about working in IT and being a woman in IT. It was a casual discussion and I thought it would be done in a short one page interview. It turns out she wrote it down verbatim for a 4 page article about “an interview with Linux Australia’s cover girl”. Funny!! 🙂

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.

“Community source” – just like open source?

I’ve just watched a talk about “Community source”, a concept out of Charles Sturt Univeristy and the “open source” Sakai project. They have coined to term Community source to differentiate themselves from FOSS basically because they want “to retain control”.

This is yet another case of an organisation trying to get the benefits and public interest in FOSS to work for them without committing to the freedoms FOSS propogate. I’ve been talking about FOSS in terms of Open Source (an OSI/FSF approved licence), Open Standards (openly published and unencumbered by patents or royalites), Open Knowledge (openly documented, open content) and Open Governance (anyone should be able to participate and if worth according to the project rise through the ranks). I strongly believe that any project that claims to be FOSS, or Open Source should rank well in each of those 4 pillars of FOSS, otherwise they aren’t really FOSS. I outline this briefly in a previous blog post.

Community source is a controlled development environment that is certainly better than proprietary, and puts control back in the hands of those who participate, however it is NOT FOSS, even if they use an OSI licence. I know there are people out there that define FOSS just by the licence chosen, however I believe this is too narrow a view. What if a project is GPL licensed but a completely closed development model, no documentation, no ability for newcomers to participate and rise in the ranks, and based completely on closed proprietary standards? I think we need to as a community broaden our definition of FOSS to look beyond the licence to the other aspects that make it FOSS.

Community source is similar in my opinion to the famous “Shared Source” that Microsoft came out with. “It’s just like Open Source, no really! Just better…”

I get frustrated at the misinformation out there about FOSS. I’ve heard of schools taking FOSS out of working infrastructure because someone up the chain heard “if it is FOSS then the students can tinker with it”, which is complete bollocks! (They are confusing code with a running system)

I would hope that the Sakai project would at the very least remove the reference to it supposedly being “free and open source” on their website. I find it a little misleading, particularly when they so strongly advocate not being FOSS.

Note: Yes, I used the little o and s in the title on purpose as that is exactly what I’m seeing today.

linux.conf.au is open for registration!

The sun is shining, the day is bright and now for your enjoyment the Seven crew have announced the registrations are open for linux.conf.au 2007. Check out:

1) The programme is up for you to check out what is happening, who is speaking and start planning your lca experience

2) Registrations are OPEN so register today! Check out the Miniconfs, Partners Programme, Sponsors and more 🙂

Remember, the earlybird prices are only available for a couple of weeks!

Rock on linux.conf.au 2007!

Internet gurus, go girls and more

The last two weeks have been madness. I’ve been to several events, met some amazing people, travelled a little and had a birthday somewhere in between.

Firstly, I already mentioned the education.au conference, which has now put up all its talks and recordings, the most interesting of which include Robert Cailliau (one of the pioneers of the internet), Leigh Blackall, and Geetha Narayanan (an inspiring Indian woman talking about technology assisting disadvantaged communities). I met some great people and really enjoyed the speakers.

Then I went to the Go Girls event in Melbourne where I gave 6 talks over two days to about 2000 schoolgirls about why IT and FOSS are such great career options. There were some amazing students there who were more socially and environmentally aware than I was at that age. We had 14 yr olds challenging the Coles home shopping initiative as it might “worsen the obesity problem in Australia”, and others questioning the impact of technology on the environment. I had some delightful girls talk to me after my talks wanting to be programmers, games developers, sys admins, and more! I also got to meet some inspiring people including Jane Treadwell, the Victoria Government CIO who was very FOSS saavy and interesting 🙂 I had a great time and am planning on doing a similar event in Sydney but looking at entire schools (girls, boys, broader age brackets and teachers) and how we can help in looking at IT careers. Anyone interested in this please contact me 🙂