GOSCON Gathers Government Officials

2005-10-13

Chief Information Officers and information technology staff from 17 states and Argentina convened today in Portland, Oregon at the first Open Source Conference. The conference was opened by Congressman David Wu, a ranking member of the House Committee on Science in the U.S. Congress. Representative Wu, a former intellectual property lawyer, spoke of his Portland region as a hub of best minds and businesses developing and benefiting from open source and free software - home of Linus Torvalds, Intel and the Eclipse Foundation.

Red Hat's Tom Rabon,Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs delivered the morning keynote highlighting the rapid adoption of open source by governments around the world. He also spoke about the current abuses of the U.S. patent system and its "monopolistic hold which stifles innovation" citing 12 patents on the movement of a cursor as an example.

The two-day conference is organized by the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. At a pre-conference dinner for speakers on Wednesday evening, Linda Hammel of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, received a round of applause. The recent adoption of Open Document file formats in Massachusetts has attracted the attention of other governments as far away as Malaysia, according to Tom Ranbon. Ms. Hammel, an attorney who did much of the due diligence on the GPL and other licenses for Massachusetts, is at GOSCON presenting a background primer on Proprietary and Open Source licenses and public sector issues.