As the 5th international famous OSS hacker visiting Hong Kong, I attended HK OSS forum organisated by HKOSSC/HKPC on 24th April.
In the first section, it was keynote speech delivered by Michael Tiemann. Michard delivered a business speech on OSS to attendee, which is aimed at success reasons of OSS in terms of business data/view, but I doubt how many business-man attending the forum to take notice of the content.
A panel discussion was held in the second section after a “no milk” tea break, even Vincent from Linux Pilot prepared good questions to ask and suit for these panel speakers, but unfortunally some speakers gave some negative responses to attendee to reflect their doubt of OSS development.
I feel it give a bad impression to attendee and Michael to doubt no participation to OSS in HK. I wanted to remind panel speakers that a number of audiences are coming from OSS community, and we got a Debian developer (Roger) and PHP developer (Alan). And a number of local commerical participants contributes source codes of lcd-proc and Linux distros, etc.
I think some of these panel speakers didn’t know much on open-source software, I doubt that they don’t know what did Michael do too. But my “reminder” was not a question, so I didn’t wave my hand during question section. I think a communication gap occurs in between local OSS community and traditional software industry, and people from traditional software industry doesn’t interested to know about OSS/Linux.
Lastly, the last person “asked” question made his “complain” insteads of question. Even I agrees that comments from some speakers are not polite to OSS community, but we should be polite to these speakers from traditional software industry because of their misunderstanding to OSS. We should give a professional image to these traditional players.
Hi Sammy. Being one of the discussion panelist, I feel awful. My findings is myself not a good person to handle such situation in my last wikipedia HK event and this one. It make myself over nervous to speak publicly for some occasionally public discussion but in fact, single side bias stand for promotion. Besides, I really dislike such kind of show that are wrapped up my different parties’ self-interest.