Today OSCON 2006 attracted about 200 people interested in open source technology. This event was hosted by the Austrian chamber of commerce. I attended the keynote of DI. Robert Gehring the author of the TU Berlin open source handbook (free for download).

R. Gehring elaborated on the misbalanced international software industry. US companies outperform the European software market, which should be addressed by the EU to reduce dependencies and grow European added value. He predicts OSS will be the solution for Europe. EU governments should prefere OSS to propriatary software form US companies.

 

For me this is a simplification of reality. OSS is not only all against Microsoft or simply against US. He did not show how many OS project have been done on MS platform, the actual mix of OS software and commercial software for mission critical solutions. This is a very opportunistic approach to gain visibility in the IT community. I hope next year Microsoft will be invited also to show their perspective on OSS.

 

I really enjoy Johannes Zeitelbergers comments on the keynote. He put OSS into the right perspective – for some it’s fun, he said, and this seems to be the most important aspect.  This does not mean per se that all outcomes are valuable. Most of the time that seems to be irrelevant, he joked.