i'm back home from the trans-pacific open source conference and am using the weekend to get down to the business of catching up with my housework. when i arrived home a small wooden pail of bath goodies awaited me with a note from t., which is just what i needed.
the event started off difficult: attendance was low, i was witness to vendors taking advantage of local efforts without supporting them in kind, local government is sadly myopic and i managed to argue twice with my mother (whom i was staying with while there) over our moral differences in the first two days i was there. i was questioning the wisdom of me having gone, and instead of coming home at the end of the day and breaking open the code editor i generally just went to sleep after prepping for my talk the next day.
but then things picked up. i went to a meeting of local technology entrepreneurs and talked about open source and KDE with a number of people there. the box of kubuntu CDs i brought emptied quicker at the tposscon conference than i expected. family life (esp seeing my niece again for the first time in years) improved, finishing off with a gourmet vegan meal prepared by yours truly. i was interviewed at my high school for their video magazine about culture and community. the last set of presentations were really well done and though provoking, such as john terpstra's "linux: the business opportunity".
but most uplifting was on the last day of the conference, following a lot of discussion on how to improve the event for next year, was the creation of the hawaii linux project. i presented the end note entitled "10 ways to get involved in open source" and jim thompson closed the event with the hawaii linux proposal: a localized version of linux done through the local hawaiian charter schools. this includes translating everything into hawaiian, providing hawaiian calendars and artworks ... the whole bit. they'll most likely be using kubuntu as the base for that as well. it was very encouraging to see not only support but action being taken in support of open source and the local people.
and as if that wasn't enough, i learned that the western samoan delegates had decided to go ahead with switching all 9000 of their educational desktops to linux. apparently they will be using the kde-based linspire distribution for this. perhaps we'll get a samoan translation of kde sometime in the future =)
audio recordings of the presentations are available online, with video to follow.
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7 comments:
cool! I liked a lot the speech. Would it be possible to obtain the slides?
@paurullan: i'm sure i/we could do that.. which one(s) in particular were you interested in?
@aaron: mostly the second one. Here in our LUG (Bulma.net) we usually hold speeches at vocational centers and one of the points we usually talk about is how to get involved in free software comunity. (do not care to mail them directly to paurullan at bulma dot net)
thank you for the interest ;)
John Terpstra's :-).
He, he, he. I've just smiled all the way through his 'Business Opportunity' presentation about where Linux is today and where the market actually is. It's basically what I'd commented on somewhere or other some time ago - small and medium sized businesses (or somewhere below the enterprise bollocks people have been talking about for years). I think his interpretation of this market and the enterprise one is a little bit muddled in my mind because there's a fair bit of cross-over between the two, and also where Microsoft makes most of it's money, but the truisms in there are unbelievable, some not everyone seem to have got. The stealing of business from under the noses of the very supplier that had given them the business in the first place (and doing employed IT Managers out of a job in my experience). I'm speechless. This guy is brilliant.
However, even though he brought down the hammer very close to the nail he didn't hit it unfortunately. The question he didn't answer was how? Yes SMEs are where people should be focusing their attentions, but how and what with? Unfortunately, this question is complex to answer. It depends on getting a channel to these potential users and customers, and it isn't going to through the channel that Microsoft has. It isn't going to be done through OEMs either, at least not yet, because Microsoft controls that path. It's rather like how Microsoft hates Google for the way they make money. They can't get to their channel.
It's also about the technology. Is it good enough for that task? What is required? More easy to use, step by step graphical tools? How do those step by step tools get created? Red Hat is the market leader and their graphical tools are woeful and are no good for SME products, and I happen to think they're using the wrong development tools and have reached their limit. How does the server back-end support the desktop? In what order do you do things? Do you build a server back-end first to support an open source desktop, or do you follow the sheep and believe that you have to go down blind alleys of supporting Windows Media, Office formats and Exchange?
Where's the money going to come from? Yes you have an open source community, but they can't provide everything. You need marketing, you need development tools and frameworks for them to do their stuff and you need specific tools for specific purposes to get ahead. You need a business model allied to an open community as well as a distribution channel that does not involve the regular ones until the economic pressure on OEMs simply becomes too great.
Therein lies the how.
I know I'm late, but is it possible to get slides of "10 ways...". I don't want to download so much audio what might fit into 20 kpresenter slides. And I think for some time now how to get involved, the KDE web site was not much help so far.
Thanks a lot!
matthias.peinhardt (AT) googlemail.com
the slides are on my website:
http://aseigo.bddf.ca/cms/1343
they are my usual minimalistic slides, though. i tend not to rely on slide content very much =)
You gave me an interesting idea. Thx.
Steve @
Opportunities
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