Bobulate

When I give a talk, I usually take people in the audience as examples. This is why people who know me usually sit two or three rows back if they possibly can help it, or all of a sudden they’re likely to be labeled the Evil Software Corp. or something worse. "You there, you’re BSD licensed, and over on this side we’re GPL, right?"

Usually these things work out OK, but when people end up associated with companies, I do make mistakes. So the Fedora guy (not rrix, Jakub, I think) with a red hat on in the audience was my example for companies that might be concerned about the effect of the GPLv3 on their ability to ship KDE as part of their embedded products. That’s utter bollocks, though. Red Hat have been one of the bigger GPLv3 supporters throughout the process, and they ship plenty of GPLv3 products. So scratch that example, should you watch the video. Next time I’ll pick someone with a different-coloured hat. other than that, I think the talk went pretty well.

Last week I gave a talk at an NOiV event (NOiV is the Dutch government agency created to oversee the motion to prefer Free Software in government procurement) and today the speakers got back the evaluation results. I’m happy to have gotten good marks (7.5 out of 10) and to have had “Adriaan’s enthusiasm for Open Source” named explicitly by two different respondents as a cool thing about the event.

Now I need to change my style for any speaking I may be doing at GCDS. I’ve promised to bring the traditional (?) speaker-motivation instruments for Akademy, and I’ll need to lay off the buzzwords a little.

Yesterday I gave a talk at an NOiV event (the NOiV is the Dutch government bureau leading Open Systems, Open Standards and Open Source adoption). You can find the schedule here where you’ll find I was the closing keynote speaker (warning: both sites in Dutch). I never got around to blogging this in advance, possibly because I assume readers of my blog aren’t IT managers at Dutch local councils. It’s quite interesting talking to people in this area, because they do have long-term societal responsibility — which is something that the four Freedoms of Free Software address — and yet at the same time are stuck with interoperability and transition questions from decades of proprietary software use. So I seized the opportunity to learn more about the tax office, libraries and the police and they way they operate their IT infrastructure and software selection process. On the whole it was a pretty successful day, and I was glad to hear from several folks that they appreciated my talk. I’ll probably end up at the NOiV again in September at one of their inspirational events. That’s enlightened self-interest on my part, too 🙂

[[ As an aside, I found www.ictkalender.nl today, which seems to have a pretty complete view of IT events in the Netherlands. I’d never heard of it before, nor have I checked if it actually lists all the Free Software events in the Netherlands or any of the non-commercial offerings, but it seems fairly complete. There’s a DrupalJam going on tomorrow, for instance. ]]