Last week I had the pleasure to give a presentation about Open Source software at the office at the 3 ^rd FLOSS Conference of the Greek OS community. It was an interesting conference, as I had the chance to talk to many nice people working with and on Open Source software and I could watch some interesting presentations. Just to mention a few, here is what IMHO was interesting especially from an OpenOffice.org perspective. BTW: attention should be paid to the logo! :-)

Wietse Venema talked about bugs and security. The core problem he sees is that buggy software works – to some degree. So often developers start with something they can show to others to try or modify and fix bugs later. But he thinks that this won't create secure software, regardless how many people look on the code. All in all it was a quite provocative talk. But if you don't take everything verbally (especially his suggestion to make writing code much harder!), it was lot of food for thoughts.

Lisa Petridis showed some interesting projects and activities of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education ( ISKME) and especially talked about the OER Commons Initiative. I think this is an area where OpenOffice.org and XML Metadata in ODF 1.2 can become quite interesting as a tool helping teachers and other contributors to build a knowledge database.

Pieter Hintjens didn't give a presentation but a great speech. He told us interesting things about about legal issues around software patents, Open Source business models, monopolies and open standards. He sees open standards as a critical part of our modern technological infrastructure and showed examples where they are important and where they are in danger to become a victim of racketeering. Unfortunately I recognized that his talk raised my own level of paranoia considerably – but as the saying goes, “being paranoid doesn't mean that they are not after you”. ;-)

Barbara Held from the European Commission's Programme for Interoperable Delivery of pan-European eGovernment Services ( IDABC) presented about Open Source in the Public Sector. Beneath a lot of other interesting things she told us something that I wholeheartedly support:

“If you don't insist on open standards, you kill Open Source.”

Jan Wildeboer from Red Hat took the same line. His summary was:

• Open standards promote healthy competition

• Open Source already delivers!

• Promote and support open standards!

• Care about Royalty Free

• Start with yourself, use ODF!

I especially love the last one. :-)

Besides that it was great to get together after the sessions until late in the night, sitting somewhere in the Plaka (the Old Town of Athens), drinking beer or wine, talking about OS software, politics, education and everything else. I really enjoyed that and learned a lot. For example that people wearing Red Hats don't drop it even at Dinner. :-)

And of course Athens definitely is worth a visit!