I just completed a day and one half attending the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) in Portland, Oregon. This was the third such conference, but the first I have attended. I attended for one very PDF related reason. I found these sentences on their web page to publicize the conference|:
"The maintenance and exchange of the most important records such as certificates of birth, marriage and death, taxes, licenses, deeds, laws, regulations, codes and rules -- as well as their role in business processes -- are the responsibility of IT officers around the globe." (see the description of GOSCON's Executive Panel)
To me this sounded an exact match for PDF/A, the archiving subset of PDF. Yet the only document formats mentioned in the rest of the material were OOXML and ODF. The speaker list seemed to invite yet another back and forth between Microsoft and ODF supporters. Adobe wants PDF (or PDF/A, or PDF/E, or PDF/X) to be the file format of choice when most appropriate. There are more PDF files on the Web than ODF, OOXML, and .doc all together. There are billions of PDF files in existence. PDF was announced in June 1993 and with few exceptions everyone of those files is still viewable and printable with today's software from many vendors including many open source projects. It doesn't attest to what will be true 50 or 100 years from now, but PDF has done better than any other document format for maintaining its archiving ability for over 14 years. Yet PDF was completely unmentioned on a panel about Open Document Formats, unmentioned in any of the other conference material. So one of my colleagues sent off a note to the organizers asking if Adobe could get someone on the panel to bring PDF into the discussion. For whatever reason, we had only heard about this conference at the last moment. But to our surprise the organizers agreed that I could be part of that panel. So off to Portland for Monday and Tuesday morning!
I had some trepidation since I am certainly not an open source advocate and even though Adobe has some significant open source work (Tamarin) underway, I thought I might be attacked by the vociferous crowd that worship at the open source alter. Might I be provoked to defend myself in an unprofessional manner? It isn't that I don't think people should do open source, it is just that I basically don't get it. I am a true capitalist at heart and I was just a bit old to be one of the back to basics persons of the 60s and in order for me to understand open source I need to know how the programmers get paid for all this "free" work.
Well I did learn a great deal by attending this conference, am definitely more tolerant and understanding of the idea, but not quite yet a true believer. This conference had just over 150 attendees with about 1/2 from Oregon, mostly city and state government employees, and the rest of the attendees were from all over the world. Malaysian Government had a delegation of 3 or 4 since they have been quite successful in using open source software. The Conference was, how shall I say, definitely Linux supportive, although people did talk about lots of other things. I would rate the average speaker as "B" or "C+" with a few outstanding and a few not so good. The technical level was somewhat low with too much evangelical promotion.
I guess my key take-away was as follows. Big government can afford to hire vendors to write custom software for them to accomplish their goals. Smaller government groups have many, if not all, of the same needs and yet they cannot afford to get custom software created or to create it themselves. And I guess the vendor community is not doing a thorough job of building turn-key software that gets a large enough sales coverage to be cheap enough for this market. Something like that. And this conference had a lot of attendees from smaller government groups. It ranged from people from IT departments under correctional institutions to people representing 5 person's police departments to city IT personnel. What makes a great deal of sense for these government agencies is to band together to define and get the software that they require created. Open source methods fit this pretty well. Consortia might do just as well. The agencies have money but it would go a lot further if they could share costs 10 ways, or 50 ways or 1000 ways.
There were three keynotes, which were pretty good (head of Linux Foundation, director of Eclipse Ecosystem , VP from Gartner) and then 4-way parallel sessions. One speaker backed out at the last minute and so they offered Doug Johnson from Sun and me the opportunity to organize a session on Open Source versus Open Standards. Neither of us is shy about speaking our mind so for a last minute session, we did OK; I would give us a "B-".
Overall I'm glad I attended. I forced some attention to PDF, the primary objective, and I learned more about open source and perhaps more importantly how open source advocates reason. And I did attend one session where a Microsoft guy and an IBM guy squared off on OOXML versus ODF. Surprising there were less that 15 people attending. Maybe we are getting tired of this argument. But I would have been disappointed if there had not been such a session. I think the IBM guy won by a small bit. Contact me at jking@adobe.com.
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