Recap of OSS events in Hong Kong

I apologize for not better blogging about all the recent Hong Kong open source events. I’m promising to do better. Here’s a recap of some recent activities I’ve had the chance to attend:

Hong Kong’s Kapok Gallery recently featured an exhibit on the intersection between open source and art entitled, Right Click：Open Source New Media Art Exhibition. I had the chance to meet Josh Minor from Pixar whose work, Video Pong, was featured. I didn’t expect to find open source art exhibits here, so I find this event particularly encouraging.

Professor Bebo White, concluded his most recent visit to Hong Kong with a talk at the University of Hong Kong on Open Source Software—A Collaboration Platform for Web Applications. His presentation was well attended and he the session went a little long due to all the discussion he stirred up. I heard a lot of questions about open source business models, open source versus commerical software, and some criticism noting that most open source software are very technical low-level tools and components. I’ll have an article up soon responding to some of those comments. It was great to meet Prof White and I look forward to his next visit to Hong Kong.

Finally, yesterday I attended a short seminar on How to successfully develop an open source software market hosted by the Hong Kong Open Source Software Center (HKOSSC). The meeting included speakers from Linux Pilot, IBM, Red Hat / JBoss, and HKOSSC. I’m grateful that at least one of the speakers, Ben Wang from Red Hat, spoke in Mandarin as my Cantonese is pretty non-functional. The fact that such events are occurring is a sign of interest in open source here in Hong Kong, but that interest still appears to be mostly top down. I expect a similar format and approach at next week’s open source conference in Guangzhou.

Speaking of upcoming events, I’ll be in Guangzhou next week for Open Source China, Open Source World. I’m also getting the word out about the new joint Apache and Eclipse conference here in Hong Kong in November: OS Summit Asia. I’ll have another article about that soon.