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Toronto Open Source Conference Report

Posted by michael on from the oh-canada dept.

derrickoswald writes "Today's Ottawa Citizen is running a report in the TechWeekly section on the recent open source conference in Toronto organized by U of T's interdisciplinary Knowledge Media Design Institute and last month's Real World Linux trade show. It highlights the extremely poor Extremadura region of Spain's success story using open source to bootstrap themselves technologically. Quotes from FOSS luminaries include: 'Who controls the software, controls life. Well, it had better us. That's the real political meaning of the free software movement,' said Eben Moglen. Open source 'was the default way you built Internet Infrastructure. You wrote code and released it without trying to commercialize and monetize it,' said Brian Behldendorf." Newsforge (also part of OSDN) has a series of reports on the conference: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

3 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. PowerPoint? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    PowerPoint was required
    Behlendorf led off with a comment that he is not used to PowerPoint -- the presentation software of choice for the conference, which is running Windows XP -- and apologized in advance if the PowerPoint requirement caused him to slip up, because he said he is used to the OpenOffice.org variant of the software.

    Any idea why PowerPoint/XP were chosen in the first place, seeing as it's an OpenSource conference?

    1. Re:PowerPoint? by Emunix · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah... all of our conference spaces at U of T are equipped with XP and PowerPoint and I doubt our techs were going to bother switching for the conference when they'll need to load XP and PowerPoint again for summer section professors who are used to PowerPoint.

  2. Gasp... by carvalhao · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am Portuguese and am currently working with a Spanish colleague who was falbbergasted when he read about the "extremely poor region of Extremadura". Hey, it looks like we're talking about sub-saarian Africa of something!

    As a matter of fact, Spain is one of the best developed economies in the European Union. There may be some regions where e-development may not have reached somewhat high standards, but hold on! :)