AOSS 2008 In Review

By J Aaron Farr on Tuesday, March 18, 2008

In 2003, Japan’s CICC help organize the first Asia OSS Symposium. The AOSS event held last week in Guangzhou, China is the 10th and last of these conferences organized by CICC. Now that publically sponsored open source centers exist in 13 Asian countries and OSS is becoming adopted across the region, the original goals of the CICC have been met. So, in a sense I was lucky to attend this last conference, although the OSS centers have already started making plans to run independent events (with the next in the Philippines I think).

My part in this year’s event was to help with the student-focused codefest and to share a presentation on The Apache Way. I also got a chance to spend the week getting to know the great people at the Guangdong Linux Center, as well as other open source folks from around Asia.

I was actually really impressed with the presentations on the afternoon of the first day. Kent Tong from Macau described a project in which they took SQL-Ledger and modified for use by SME’s in Macau. It was a great example of adapting existing open source for specific needs and markets. And Mr. Lim Kin Chew from Singapore actually used an Asus Eee PC to run his presentation. Later on the Red Office guys gave their update (they’re working on a large update to the UI). The NEC Soft representative, Mr. Motoki Mori, did a presentation on their Eclipse RCP based products and explained why they joined the Eclipse Foundation. So it was really cool to see what’s going on in areas other than China.

Unfortunately, the event was only attended by maybe 200 people. This was still a good crowd, but the venue could have held a lot more. I think part of low attendence was due to limited marketing and no clear targeted audience. The conference is not technical enough to warrant engineers attending, but isn’t setup to appeal to project leaders or managers either. Personally, I think this is a problem for a lot of open source “promotional” events, particularly in China. But then again, the technically-focused OSSummit event planned for last year didn’t work out either, so I’m not quite sure what the right solution is.

Slides from my talks are available below: