I stumbled across the "Free Software and Open Source Symposium 2006 Toronto" on the weekend, it has some excellent video and audio material discussing various aspects FOSS.

Includes speakers from OpenOffice.org (Louis Potts), a Drupal company, Mozilla project, Novell etc. http://cs.senecac.on.ca/fsoss/2006/speakers.html

Download the video/audio directly at http://cs.senecac.on.ca/fsoss/2006/recordings

Meeting notes from 3rd November 2006. Facilitated by David Symons, presentation by Andrew Smith.

Introduction

David introduced FOSSACT, the committee members in attendance, sponsorships and upcoming events. There will be no January meeting.

Presentation - Asterisk

Andrew presented Open Source Telephony, Asterisk in particular. The presentation included real demonstrations with a temporary network setup and was extremely well received. Andrew has provided additional information relevant to the presentation here.

From the "stories-we'd-like-to-see-here dept.":

"The City of Chicago migrated to Red Hat in order to reduce costs and improve support performance and scalability. The city has already saved more than $250 000 and is reducing server hardware maintenance and operating costs as a result of Oracle's certification and support infrastructure on Red Hat.

Impressive results were immediately noted by the City Clerk's office responsible for the City Stickers program. Sun Solaris benchmarked at 50 268 transactions per minute while the HP DL580 G2 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux benchmarked at over 149 500 transactions per minute. When running the city's long batch cycles Red Hat Enterprise Linux proved to be 50 percent faster. The significantly improved performance has increased total revenue for the project as well."

Read more @ principal.com

Meeting notes from 6th October 2006. Facilitated by Neill Cox, presentation by Finn Blucher.

FOSSACT introductions

Neill introduced the FOSSACT committee members and invited attendees to introduce themselves.

FOSSACT Sponsorship

FOSSACT Sponsorships are scaled according to company size:

• 10 staff or less = $250/year
• more than 10 staff = $500/year

More details on sponsorship and its benefits can be found here.

"The Danish government could save around 125 million Danish krone ($A28.5 million) over the next five years if it adopted the OpenOffice.org productivity software instead of upgrading to Microsoft's Office 2007 suite. Doing nothing could save it even more, according to a study by consultancy Rambøll Management A/S."

The report entitled "Estimating the Costs of Implementing Office OpenXML and ODF in the Central Government" is available (in English) from Danish Open Source Business Association at http://www.osl.dk/upload-mappe/ram_engPDF/

The September 2006 edition of the LUG Radio podcast includes an interview with Pia Waugh talking about Software Freedom Day (19.24).

Check it out @ http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/61

Linux.com has an article on how "Scalix is sneaking Linux in through the corporate mailbox".

Scalix was one of the open source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange presented by Justin Freeman at the last FOSSACT meeting.

Read the article here.

The French Ministry of Defence finds six security "issues" in OpenOffice. Also claims that security issues with MS Office are "easily transportable to OpenOffice". OpenOffice.org responds that the *one* bug found has been fixed.

More: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39280930,00.htm

Agenda and other details at: http://www.afei.org/brochure/6a04/index.cfm

Appears the evangelists may be doing it tough persuading the military of the benefits of open source. Nick Farrell writing in The Inquirer observes: "[Open source]software is made,..completely different[ly] from how big military projects are executed. The military likes its software to be made like IBM ma[ke] it, a nice factory operation that appears on time."

More: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34442

Related links: http://www.gcn.com/blogs/tech/42016.html

The Canberra Software Freedom Day event led the world by happening a week ahead (Sep 9th) of the day itself (Sep 16th).

Report and Pictures.