This post is long overdue however the things that I present in Alicante were pretty interesting. Contrasting what Malaga had, this event was much more smaller yet it was very rewarding in the sense I got the time to chat with people all around the world.Basically I want to propose projects and enterprise deals that will benefit the OOo community and the overal FLOSS adoption. These projects benefit both parties and also make the project even a bigger proposal for everybody. I digress…The conference started with a bit of dissapointing un-attendance in the sence that most of the speakers were just leaved to their own luck. Nobody pick me up from the airport nor help me with my settling around Andalucia. I didn’t had any chance to see the city beyond what my legs walked me through. However on the other side, I got a good time relaxing and finally having a break from the constant flying. So I had the chance to take a long bath and really relax for a while. Also the fact the hotel was also a Spa hotel help me enjoy even more using some of their pillow menu.The next day was pretty good, got to meet with John Maddog from Linux International again and talk about Obama‘s win and what it could mean for the US. After the quick meal we were ready for the event. I came in early because I really want to see the expo before people came in. I was able to see a really great set up full of wide variety of hardware. People had thin clients running the host distro — lliurex. Lliure means freedom in Valencian and this is like freedomX.So I got to talk wtih the people of many of the companies, associations an sponsors that were in the event. I got to chat about developments and innovations and how OOo will be presenting great stuff with the education project.Unfortunately I felt many of the atendees that mattered weren’t there to attend to the conference so my message might have not been correctly targeted. After my talk I sensed many people were simply users and they didn’t had the means to push an education project forward. At the same time I think that through the magic of the internet and since the talk was recorded. There is still hope for many to at least by recycling my conference through services like Slideshare.Other talks were interesting but i most say that I wasn’t attending to many of them since the education target and the fact that they were giving it in valencian really didn’t help my attention span. I rather was doing some work on my laptop about things to make O4Biz and the Education presentation more smooth.Since one of the event participants didn’t make it, I was asked to give a second talk during the conference. That meant that I would be able to give my first part of my tour presentation. The repeat of the great Open for business conference. Again I felt the audience was the best for the talk but I was happy that at least i got a recording out of this great talk which I couldn’t record at OSWC.After the conference I got the chance to talk with many of the Lliurex project including the main manager of the project Sofia Belez, who is a very kind and beautiful woman. We got to get around the option of integrating the Valencian localization into the OOo project and avoid issues during their building process. Is funny because a simple email would have done it. However they had two years talking with Sun and different entities and they have got nowhere. This means that there is still a change of culture to be made. The internet is an open platform but sometimes dealing with phisical people can prove to be a handicap. Instead of contacting developers they contact distros which don’t make software so applying changes will only fork the projects.However now that we are on the right track we can start leveraging and building upon freedom. Not however without the support of the rest of the OOo community. Is important that projects such as big as OOo we can have sustainable communication networks and protocols so that information reaches to a higher than normal spead wtihout falling into the usual pitfalls of flamewars that can stigmatize a project or initiative.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 