Day: 17 May 2004

Interesting fact: the conference was also presented online in realtime to attendees around the world. They used ePresence, a LiveMeeting-esque interactive webcasting system developed at UofT. They plan to release that software as open source in the near future.

Trackbacks

• Daniel Allen has set up the unofficial wiki for OSCONF.
• Slashdot With links to articles from the Ottawa Citizen and Newsforge.
• ITBusiness.ca Only covers the morning of Day 2, and then angles it as Young (Red Hat) vs. Matusow (MS).
• GrokLaw PJ expresses interest in the ePresence system used for webcasting this conference.

Webcasts of the conference will be also be available for free on the website.

Pet Peeves
Scheduling: This conference could have easily been four days. Day 2 ended at 9pm AT NIGHT. And many attendees were turned away from the microphones due to lack of time.

Do what we say, not as we do: In Day 1, Brad Behndorf apologized before hand if his slides were a bit messed up, since the presenter laptop used PowerPoint. Gary from Teledyn pointed out the conference website ran on Microsoft IIS 6.0. It

I missed the morning of the final day of the Open Source Conference at the University of Toronto, but I did get back in time to see the closing arguments and final keynote.

Joseph Potvin, Public Works, Government of Canada, pledged that the Canadian government was serious about standards, and committed to embracing the “full
spectrum of software models”. He reasons that since the government is for the people, they should have a stake in running free/open software by the people. He also runs GOSLING, a community dedicated to promoting the use of OSS in government.

Two poetic descriptions of the open source community: “a wellspring of human spirit” and “a group consciousness”.

The panel concluded by saying that knowledge sharing is a sign of a heathy economy.

In the end, open source advocates agree on one thing: the FLOSS ideology appeals to the heart and also the mind. They feel there are