The Google presentation by the lovely Zaheda Bhorat was interesting even if the minutiae of her presentation was queried by RMS. (Just which license is used for that?). She spent a lot of time on code.google.com
The presentation by Les Timms about the Open Source Academy and the work they’ve done in promoting FOSS in Birmingham City Council was interesting even if he was interrupted again by RMS. (It’s not open source, it’s free).
Owen Hughes from Oracle provided the most humour. He spent a lot of time talking about the free stuff from Oracle and allowed himself to be sidetracked into why Oracle DBMS isn’t open source rather than focussing on how much Oracle contributes to open source projects. The guys from Google in front of me spent a goodly amount of time sniggering about him. A bit unfortunate but even I resent how the word “free” has been hijacked.
Lunch was fun – spent talking to InvestNI.
After lunch was RMS. He went on for a bit about his four freedoms.
- 0. freedom to run it as you wish
- 1. freedom to modify the source code
- 2. freedom to make copies and distribute
- 3. freedom to help the community
To be honest, the best bit was near then end when RMS made a crack about vi. Apparently:
vi vi vi is the editor of the beast
As I use vi and not emacs, I could appreciate this.
The biggest problem with the fanatical FOSS argument is that it doesn’t tell me how a couple of developers can create a company and hope to make a living at something they love. The FOSS world seems designed for IT professionals (because support is a major part of it) but not really for the writers of the code. And the hardware argument always trips them up. None of them are using FOSS hardware. All of them are using proprietary BIOS software.
Anyway, in conclusion?
Not too bad. Marred by the lack of power points, the complete lack of WiFi, the lack of tables, the lack of namebadges (to help networking), the lighting designed to induce migraines, the lack of something like a WikiWall or other mechanism for you to meaningfully interact with the other delegates. the companies that set up stalls around the periphery were mostly ignored but I’d rather have seen some presentations from them – companies providing Linux support, companies providing FOSS VoIP solutions.