Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

August 3, 2008

The annual "August Penguin Conference" was held Friday in Tel Aviv and attendees were allowed to work with open-source software.

Since 2001, it was the seventh August Penguin conference, sponsored by the Israeli open-source advocacy group, HaMakor (meaning the source) and co-sponsored by a number of other organizations, ranging from the Israeli branch of the Internet Society, to small companies servicing the open-source sector, to Microsoft.

Overall, Microsoft was a major sponsor of the conference, and its logo appeared prominently on the conference program, as well as on the T-shirts that were distributed to each attendee.

There was even a very well-attended session at which a Microsoft manager (Amir Shevat) tried to convince the crowd that the war is over, and that it's worth trying to find ways in which Microsoft and the open-source community can work together.

In particular, Shevat said that just as Sun and Oracle have found ways to work together with Microsoft in some ways, while competing bitterly in others, so too must the open-source community find ways to cooperate when possible.

His talk was repeatedly interrupted by hostile comments and criticism, some of which were easily dismissed, and others were never satisfactorily answered. The talk ended on a sour note, as Shevat ran out of time, the audience's comments were not completely answered, and the questions of whether and how the open-source community can work with Microsoft were not seriously discussed.

A major issue among Israeli computer users, and which impedes the more general adoption of open-source software among Israelis, is the lack of good bidirectional writing support in many applications. Shoshana Forbes, who has worked for several years to translate OpenOffice.org in Hebrew, described some of the challenges associated with bidi applications.

A local Israeli blogging platform "Blogli" (meaning blog for me) gave a non-technical talk that described how they set up their platform, and how they interact with the larger WordPress and WordPress-MU community. Still another talk discussed the challenges associated with OCR for Hebrew, and work that has been done on the hocr project to advance that technology.

Like any good conference, much of the action at the August Penguin took place in the lobby, outside of the two lecture halls.

Along from the annual open-source developer conferences that have taken place over the last few years, August Penguin is one of the year's major gatherings for open-source users in Israel -- and the fact that August Penguin takes place on a Friday morning, which marks the beginning of the Israeli weekend, meant that many people with jobs outside of the open-source world were able to attend.

I came away from this year's August Penguin with a sense that while open source is still something of a strange concept for many Israelis, it is becoming increasingly mainstream -- and that there is a large and growing community of users.

The key to open source is a strong community, and the Linux community is getting stronger every year.

Source: L.N.Q.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

ADVERTISERS:
Linux News Today.org is read by over 450,000 people involved in the field of Linux application development, professional Web hosting services, Linux security, Linux Web development, etc. Inquire about our reasonable advertising rates on our news website. One of our advertising representatives will be in touch with you. Simply email us to learn about our ad rates and how we can help drive relevant traffic to your website. Advertising space is limited.