Re: [ossig] FOSSCON 2005

[Dinesh Nair <dinesh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 27/01/2005 14:12 Ditesh said the following:
> No dude, the scope of the conference that I'm suggesting is more OSCON 
> instead of USENIX kinda of conference. Relatively high level, and good 
> enough for developer of any genre to get involved.

strictly for awareness, that'll work.

> suggested on the wiki to get zend people involved as I can see them 
> appealing to the more business minded in the crowd.

the bosses need to be convinced. in many cases, the choice of dev platform 
is a given when the bosses strike a partnership deal with the closed source 
vendor or platform provider. for eg, microsoft has their partner 
programmes, as do sun and the others. ibm has the same for websphere.

> applications. But adopting FOSS technologies != releasing FOSS code. 
> There is an important difference there.

granted, i recognize the difference.

> No, as I stated before, I don't foresee an increase in local FOSS 
> developers either. That's _NOT_ the goal, at least from my perspective. 

ok, maybe i'm looking at it with a more long term goal in mind. my end 
objective (X months or years in the future) is to /increase/ the pool of 
developers working on FOSS architectures, platforms and languages and by 
extension, increase the software capacity of Malaysia as a nation. as an 
employer, i can provide the opportunities for work and OTJ training. but we 
need more employers to make it economically attractive to the developers to 
consider this as a viable job market.

in that vein, i'm trying to decompose the steps which need to be 
implemented progressively in order to achieve that goal.

remember my OSSPIP mantra, "people dont buy operating systems or 
technologies. they buy applications, and these applications will decide 
what operating systems and technologies they drag with them." ?

> If I see a goal in this initial developer conference, it would be 
> exposure of FOSS technologies to the non-FOSS community. I see 

if it's pure exposure, then FOSSCON2004 did that rather well by bringing in 
two high profile OSS luminaries. i'd wager that attendees were exposed to 
PHP, MySQL and the like during the conference itself.

but pure evangelizing will need to be augmented with other stuff if we want 
to increase the pool of FOSS developers. otherwise, after X FOSSCONs with 
the evangelizing theme, we'd still be having the same discussion 3 years 
down the road.

> On a separate note (regardless of the theme we decide to go with), there 
> has been substantial enthusiasm from the community. On the wiki page, 

i've said it before, organizing a conference takes a lot of leg and grunt 
work. that enthusiasm has to translate into this for it to succeed.

-- 
Regards,                           /\_/\   "All dogs go to heaven."
dinesh@alphaque.com                (0 0)    http://www.alphaque.com/
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