Sydney Australia… woohoo! its about bloody time the FOSS4G conference came down under. So what’s gonna be so cool about it? Going by the press release the conference will have the usual suspects - the passionate community of users and developers - but some of them may be disguised in suits.

Yes you heard me SUITS!… understanding the business drivers for Geospatial Open Source is critical for greater uptake of FOSS4G in the enterprise; apart from saving thousands on license fees, better quality software and standards compliance there is now the added bonus of passion. Passion can make a huge difference to the culture of an organisation and there is no question about users of Open Source technology being passionate. If you ask a developer in your company: “please code up this application using such and such (proprietary) software” vs. “please code up this application using such and such (open source) software” then most developers are likely to be more passionate about open source than proprietary - as it gives them greater exposure and if they get to contribute a feature back to the community they get their name in the hall of fame which can lead to greater things. Even Microsoft understand this

So going by the theme of the conference User Driven FOSS4G there are likely to be managers interested in attending the conference. I should say I’m on the local organising committee and am really excited about working with the community and OSGeo to make FOSS4G 2009 worthy of its name and reputation i.e. a conference where great GeoSpatial ideas blossom and coffee flows freely. In the mean time lets make sure that FOSS4G 2008 is a success.

UPDATE: here is a an article on open source development in Australia and a list of some cool Australian’s doing open source