grep.ro

I'm at the second day of the eLiberatica 2008 conference, in Bucharest. I also came to eLiberatica last year, and it was a great conference, so I had to come back. Last year there were lots of open-source people from various successful projects, making a pitch for open-source in general and open-source business models in particular. Motivations for individuals to contribute to an open-source project were also a highlight.

This year the focus is a little different: it's geared towards selling the benefits of using open-source to companies and government. That's not as much fun for a geek, but some of the talks are still great. And, compared to last year, I've been doing much more talking to different interesting people, and that's more than worth the investment (conference ticket and time spent here). I'm definitely seeing myself going to conferences in the future.

I just did one of the scariest and fun things in a while: I took the microphone at this conference to get a quick show of hands, to make a point. It worked beautifully; speaking at conferes is indeed a huge rush, even if it's only for 60 seconds.

Now for some highlights from the taks. There was Constantin Teodorescu from the Ministry of Communications, he told us about how OpenID is being introduced, through Romanian telephone companies and banks, to let citizens access government websites. Jani Monoses presented Kiwi Linux, a small modification to the Ubuntu distribution, tailored for the needs of Romanians and Hungarians (localization, some packages installed by default, some code to handle local ISPs). Martin Michlmayr talked about the needs of big companies when they work with open-source - processes to catalog the software they use, track updates, etc and about fossbazaar.org - a community of big companies who have open-source processes. Bill Dobie told us about his company (www.navarik.com) and how it came to serve huge oil companies, basing their software on open-source tools. And because eLiberatica is a good conference, it's going to end with a good panel of representatives of organizations working with open-source, from small to large.

All in all, the conference was definitely worth coming to; I'll probably be here again next year.

Update: the last talk was also the most interesting one. David Ascher, from Mozilla Messaging (the new Mozilla group that is working on Thunderbird), talked about Mozilla, Thunderbird and their plans. This guy, and Mozilla people in general, have just about the best jobs possible - the mission statement of their employer is to make good software and please their users. No maximizing shareholder value or other corporate-ish pressures. They have their backs covered, Mozilla Foundation is financially secure, so they're free to do great work. I'm envious.