Open World Forum took place in Paris October 1st and 2nd. This conference was sponsored by Microsoft among others and shows how the acceptance of FOSS is now firmly in the mainstream industry. There were representatives from most of the big IT companies, venture capitalists, and the communities. I managed to meet up with some old acquaintances including Louis Suarez-Potts, the OpenOffice.org community manager, Simon Phipps, Sun's Open Source evangelist, Mark Shuttleworth the man behind Ubuntu, Mark Taylor of Sirius and Steve Lee of OSSwatch. Some key things I came away with (Steve might have some comments of his own)
1. City of Munich moved about 6 years ago from Windows NT to Linux for the city administration. The experience was that it has taken longer than expected but there are no technical problems that can't be solved, the main issue is change management and changing people and attitudes. It's a human problem not a technical one.
2. Amsterdam is moving its telephone system to Asterisk, they say even if there was no immediate financial benefit it is worth doing because they maintain freedom and long term control of their infrastructure.
3. There was some tension in the "Think Tank" event between commercial and non-commercial perspectives. Those with a non-commercial perspective viewed commercial interests as watering down the Open Source definition by using the OSS term as a marketing device. They wanted companies claiming to be "open source companies" to be more than just companies that added commercial widgets to open source core products. Business models for sustaining the resources for FOSS development are still thin on the ground which is part of the reason why perceptions about the meaning of the term Open Source are being challenged with terms like "commercial open source"
4. On many occasions education came up as the single most important factor in accelerating and sustaining the FOSS ecosystem. Japan and India have FOSS competence centres. Customers need to be educated as to why FOSS has a value to them and the education systems need to encourage the skills knowledge and attitudes that underpin producing the next generation of FOSS developers. There is a massive anticipated skills shortage in FOSS and education and training need to be more geared to providing the appropriate skills, knowledge and just as importantly, attitudes, for new ways of doing business in technology.
5. One interesting statistic was that the vast majority of software produced in the World is from individual commissioning. Only about 30% of software has ever been mass produced/distributed as with commercially licensed productivity applications. If governments commissioning software for specific specialist projects released the code with FOSS licenses, FOSS would immediately become the dominant software type.
