European and US government agencies looking for
low-cost, or no-cost, software solutions can hear what the
open-source community has to offer during a conference in
Washington DC next week.
The conference, "Open Standards/Open Source for National and
Local e-Government Programs in the US and EU," will include about
125 presentations on a variety of open-source projects and topics
between Monday and Wednesday. It will also include a speaker from
Microsoft on the company's shared-source initiative, which has led
to threats of protests by some free software activists, who see
shared source as a watered-down version of free software
ideals.
The conference, at George Washington University and sponsored by
the Center of Open Source and Government, is important because
government agencies are looking for new ways to save money in their
IT budgets, said organiser Tony Stanco. This conference will focus
on government agencies in Europe and the US, while the first such
conference last October focused on how open-source software could
help governments in developing nations. A third conference is
planned for late 2003.
The goal of the conference is for open-source advocates and
government workers to "exchange ideas on the best way to move
forward," said Stanco, founding director of the open-source
centre.
Among the sessions at the conference will be Stanco talking
about the Open Source Threshold Escrow Programme (O-STEP), a
programme to help transition the software industry to open source.
O-STEP permits traditional proprietary software companies to escrow
their source code until a stated sales threshold is reached. Once
the sales threshold is hit, the code escrow breaks and the code is
released to the open-source community.
Other presentations include a point-and-click demonstration of
Linux on the desktop, a discussion of security evaluations and
open-source software, and a discussion of open-source strategies
and business models in health care. A conference agenda is
available at
http://www.egovos.org/
Meanwhile, members of New York Linux organization NYLXS still
plan to protest because Microsoft has been invited to speak. Ruben
Safir, organiser of the protests, said a group of about 10
protestors will be at the event, wearing Revolutionary War costumes
and armed with slogans such as "When good men do nothing, evil men
make deals with Microsoft". Safir had said he originally received
e-mail from about 400 people interested in the protest.