[Linux-aus] Announcing Everything Open - Conference 2023

[Brendan O'Dea]

On Thu, 13 Oct 2022 at 10:29, Craige McWhirter via linux-aus
<linux-aus at lists.linux.org.au> wrote:
> At this juncture it looks to me like LA comittee and the community have
> formally parted ways?
>
> The timing is particularly poor.
>
> There are reasons that LCA was held the way it was, when it was.
>
> "Everything Open embodies Linux Australia's values" - yet the entire site is
> entirely devoid of any values. (no, Ooen Source is not a value, it's a
> marketing tool). Transparency would be a good one to start with.
>
> What are the values of this conference, if it is replacing LCA?
>
> This no longer looks like a community event but rather a hollow vessel for
> sponsors.

Back in the day, when physical magazines used to be a thing that
people subscribed to, I was a subscriber of _Unix World_, which was a
fairly technical journal from which I learned a bunch of stuff,
including the existence of this crazy new scripting language, Perl.
It was interesting, and quirky: one of my favourite columns was
_Devil's Advocate_, penned by the inimitable Stan Kelly-Bootle.

A decade after the magazine was launched, it changed its name to _Open
Computing_, dropped the more technical articles and started to include
stuff about Windows NT which was "open" in the sense that the APIs
were published.  It ceased being something that a working programmer
would be interested in, and became the kind of thing that MIS managers
had on the shelves behind their desk to show that they were "still
technical."

    "It was a mistake they never recovered from," says Andrew
Binstock, editor-in-chief of Unix Review, one of the few surviving
publications in this field. "They expected that by broadening their
franchise, they would be able to bring on board more advertisers. What
happened is that they lost their identity."
    — http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HkoBzYFxItMJ:www.uniforum.org/news/html/publications/ufm/feb96/behindnews.html

linux.conf.au is an identity.  One which even hinged on the crazy
domain name which was technically not meant to exist, until someone
managed to talk kre into some kind of leave-pass which allowed us to
use it, but only around the conference time
(http://geonic.net/index.php?section=terms&subsection=AU&lang=RU#confau).
The time restriction appears to have been lifted.

No shade on the organisers of "Everything Open," I'm quite sure that
the motivation is pure, and the intent is to extend the range beyond
just Linux and include the Free/Net/OpenBSD folks for example.  I wish
them all the best.  I just wonder if there are cautionary tales to be
learned from using the term "Open" when the intention is to say
"Free."

--bod