Yes, on thursday and friday the number of interested visitors at our LiMux booth was as high as on wednesday. We had the possibility to discuss the advantages of free software and open standards for the public authorities in detail. One question is, what we are going to sell or what are our goals at this booth. Well, the answer is quite simple: we did it! Free software is an excellent alternative to Microsoft products and it is ready for business use.
That’s our message to other public administrations. You do not longer depend on the Microsoft monopolistic structure, you can choose between a lot of choices. Use an alternative operating system, like we do with our LiMux client, take the first step and switch to OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office, or simply use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. But you now have the choice to do so, and that’s a great achievement.
I hope other cities will follow, e.g. Berlin will be a interesting migration project. Of course, they have to be aware of huge lobbying activities by Microsoft, but since the last days, the enormous public interest and the press coverage make underground activites more difficult for Microsoft. I whish you all the best, Berlin!
Today I attended a great talk of Martin Michlmayr, a former Debian project leader. The talk was about release management in large free software projects. I got some good ideas to improve our release process for the LiMux client, which partly faces the same difficulties as free software projects. Maybe it is a good improvement to do time based release planning and not only feature based. I discussed some ideas with Martin afterwards and got the idea of a mixture o some release models. We’ll see next week…
Now it’s late and after four days and nights without much sleep I have to be prepared for the last day of Linuxtag 2007 tomorrow 