Re: [Fsfe-uk] Fwd: OSS Watch inaugural conference, 11 December 2003

[Alex Hudson]

On Thu, 2003-11-27 at 11:52, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
> > > The list of presenters at the conference includes:
> > > Nick McGrath, Head of Platform Strategy, Microsoft Ltd
> 
> Perhaps I'm being a boring old fart, but why is an open-source group at an 
> open-source conference having an MS presenter?  Presumably it's in some sort 
> of misguided attempt to be "fair" and hear "both sides of the story".  

MS turn up fairly often at these types of events; particularly where the
Government is involved. 

> But MS doesn't actually *offer* any open-source software in the standard 
> definition of the term

Actually, they did used to - not sure if they do any more. The Interix
stuff they bought was GPL'd, and had to distribute source and
everything. But, yes, your point is essentially 100% correct :)

> Perhaps David Tannenbaum, who is a researcher at OSSWatch (and will be 
> presenting at the conference), and who has asked this list for some 
> assistance recently on the free software movement in general, could pass 
> these points on to the organisers.  Better yet, perhaps he could offer some 
> justification as to why anyone should take OSSWatch seriously?

OSSWatch does hopefully serve some useful purpose, although I believe
it's still in quite early stages. But there are still a lack of
successful case studies in this arena which can be applied to the
industry broadly - I would hope this kind of conference would be useful
for dissemination of successful ideas and best practise, but there is a
bit of a lack of that kind of study at the moment. It would be
interesting to know what the goal of the conference beyond "product
education" - to be honest, I would have thought that most people who
would attend something like this would pretty much know the score by now
anyway.

I do share your concern with the "balance" thing - this is something we
only ever seem to encounter with this particular type of software. If
you go to IP Communications events, for example, there are never token
representatives of the trad telecoms industry showing "the other side".
Microsoft in particular are very good at promoting a "fair playingfield"
concept which is actually anything but - they ask that procurement be
judged on the basis of value, etc., but usually free software solutions
don't fair well in traditional proprietary procurement procedures for
various reasons.

Cheers,

Alex.