[Ambassadors] Event Report: Palmetto Open Source Software Conference

Max Spevack mspevack at redhat.com
Wed Jul 30 22:38:29 UTC 2008


Awesome report.  Thanks David!

--Max

On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, David Nalley wrote:

> I attended POSSCon today - it's a first year - seemingly business
> oriented event - more so than community oriented. I actually came
> across the event accidentally, and signed up last minute. Parking was
> about 1.5 blocks. from the event. When I got down to the building
> there were 65 people waiting outside. I was impressed by the turnout -
> as I sit inside the auditorium there are over 100 people here now. The
> Keynote from the Blue Cross Blue Shield guy seemed to be spreading a
> lot of FUD about the liability of using open source software. I
> thought that was all over with?? Maybe I have just been desentized
> after all the SCO stuff.
> Next up was Greg DeKoenigsberg - he was a welcome relief - adding a
> little humor and doing a base level presentation of what open source
> means, and how and where it excels. The audience is really more IT and
> business people and not really Linux or open source zealots, so this
> level of talk was good.
> After Greg was done we took a break and I setup an impromptu 'booth'
> and talked to people about Fedora, and Linux, etc. I say impromptu
> because there were no other booths, and one hadn't really been
> planned. Greg had brought a stack of ~50 LiveCDs and DVDs for a
> presentation I was planning on making in Greenville.  I initially
> brought about 20 of the LiveCDs that Greg brought - within 5 minutes
> they were gone along with the stack of business cards I had set out. I
> retrieved more - and would guess that all 50 were gone with 30
> minutes. I put my business cards up front and told people that if they
> didn't receive a LiveCD that they should send me an email and I'd make
> sure they received one.
> A shocking number of people at this open source conference haven't
> tried open source software to any depth - not even OpenOffice.org
> Following this was a really basic demonstration of OpenOffice.org. The
> presenter was a professor at the University of South Carolina who had
> her students create end-user howtos for OpenOffice.org this past year.
> I introduced myself to her and told her about the varied documentation
> projects we had at the Fedora Project and told her that I'd be happy
> to come down and introduce the Fedora Project to her students and see
> if we couldn't have some of their projects help Fedora out. She seemed
> receptive to this thought.
> I also met a comp sci. professor from Benedict College who was
> interested in Fedora and I told her I'd follow up with her and see if
> we could at least introduce Fedora for them.
> During lunch professors from two other universities talked to Greg
> about incorporating Open Source into their Comp Sci programs and some
> of those conversations seemed like they have potential for doing
> interesting things, perhaps akin to Seneca College, though it's
> probably far too soon to speculate.
> The following session was from an IP lawyer - he seemed to lean
> towards more FUD. Though he has 20+ years in IP law, I really missed
> the EFF types or the Duke Law people.
> The last presentation was from a Ruby developer who worked for the
> state. His presentation was somewhat interesting and he revealed that
> they are hosting a Ruby Conference. I told him I would see if schedule
> allowed for Fedora to show up and talk.
> The final event was a roundtable that had people from small and large
> businesses answering questions about their open source deployments.
> Someone asked the question if they encouraged their employees to
> contribute to the open source software projects they used. One of the
> panel members said that they would be upset if their employees were
> working on things other than 'work'. I posited the view that
> contributing back to the community was invaluable for the following
> reasons:
> 1. It builds expertise like no training every will.
> 2. It potentially means that $feature_desired_by_company will be
> implemented or implemented sooner. Being part of the community means
> that they can help point the project in a direction they want.
> I further argued that one of the panelists had said that they offer a
> 'disclaimer' to their customers that they are using Postgresql as
> their RDBMS as they consider it a risk point. I offered that if they
> were seeking to allay customer fears they'd 'force' one or more of
> their employees to contribute so they could show their customers that
> they know the product well enough that they contribute.
> One of the business-types had the value dawn on him -  but said that
> while some of these businesses may not be able to justify
> 'development' time they could certainly justify writing 'test cases'
> and doing QA on projects they were using. Neither of us seemed warmly
> received by the business types on the panel - but you could see light
> bulbs going off around the room and it generated a number of
> post-event conversations about getting involved in open source
> projects. I have around half a dozen people to follow up with now.
>
> It was a good turnout for a first year event. I wish it had been
> better advertised, particularly outside of Columbia.
> I also wished they had balanced end-users with community a bit more -
> but I made a number of contacts that would probably have not shown up
> to something much more geeky.
>
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