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Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Speaking engagements

As people become aware of the possible applications of open source in segments of society beyond the technical field, I find that I'm presented with more and more opportunities to extol the virtues of open source. (Of course, I still love presenting to the techies as well.)

Last week, I had the chance to speak at the Emerging Technology conference in Philadelphia. Presenting to a mostly technical audience on open source licensing gave me a chance to touch on the finer points of the topic, emphasizing some of the pitfalls to watch out for when using Open Source in production environments. I had a sharp audience before me, and they asked some excellent questions regarding potential litigation and the status of GPL 3.

The next day, I cruised down to Washington, D.C. to talk about application modernization with a group of politicos—including Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson and former Pennsylvania Governor Mark Schweiker. This was a great opportunity to address concerns about open source in the public sector, where the applications used are often twenty-plus years old. Most of the original programmers are no longer around, making it difficult to add new features. In my talk, I emphasized the ways in which open source can greatly help with modernizing legacy applications. It was truly an honor to share modernization possibilities with such a distinguished crowd.

Incidentally, while in D.C., I stayed at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel, one of the nicest I've ever had the pleasure to visit.

2 comments:

michaelfriars said...

Anthony: I like your blog.
Very direct and to the point.

Licensing in the OS world, it will work for those who specialise to the extent that their software is useless without a support contract?
That is the real specialists, not the comodity stuff like office suites and productivity aids.
In the end OO.O will win out!

Anthony Gold said...

Michael,
Thank you for the compliments. You make some good points about licensing. Check out CentricCRM's innovative licensing model.