Changes

I ended up watching six videos from the conference, these being:

My overall impression of the conference from these and some press release articles and blog posts were quite positive. Most of the speakers held interesting positions and brought good topics to the table. There seemed to be a fair bit of excitement around the conference itself, given its reputation. Its history shows that it was founded in 1999, as a successor to 'The Perl Conference' from 1997, and hence has a well known stature.

For reasons like these and those made by Curran, I see the value in having open standards, and realize that they are necessary for the success of open software. For any wide adoption of these to occur, and for them to be able to displace popular proprietary software, open standards should be enforced and supported. The World Wide Web is a great example of how open standards can lead to an environment in which open software can thrive. Due to the standards that were created for it right at its inception, the web has probably become the largest platform for open source software.

As I have been learning more about open source over the past year, I have found myself confused and conflicted by a few discoveries. One of these came a few months ago when I discovered a website selling Open Office for $20 per digital download. The website had a table comparing feature lists between Microsoft Office and Open Office (fairly similar), and them compared their costs, some $270 for the former, and their price of $20 for the latter. My first instinct upon visiting this site was that it was malicious in its intent and thought of reporting it to the Free Software Foundation. After a little more research I learned however that that website was not violating any rules of Open Office's LGPL and Apache licenses - they were distributing the software with the source code and original licenses included. After learning that it was not illegal to sell open source software, I realized that I hardly understood what it meant or stood for.