The use of open source is helping the government of Andalusia to save millions of Euro, said Juan María González, Secretary General for Telecommunications and Information Society for the autonomous region, on Thursday at a conference in the city of Malaga.
González' speech at a the conference on Free Knowledge and Public Administration, was cited on the Identica and Twitter social networks by attendees. On Twitter, Eduardo Romero, involved in the city of Zaragoza's move to an open source desktop, was one of those who quoted the Secretary General: "Free software is in the heart of policy and strategies of Andalusia."
The Free Knowledge and Public Administration conference was organised by a Focus Initiativa, an NGO on open society, with support from Cenatic, Spain's open source resource centre and the governments of Extremadura and Andalusia. This two-day conference is one of two events organised ad hoc to replace the Open Source World Conference, (OSWC) which should have taken place this week but which the government of Andalusia cancelled some twenty days ago, citing lack of funds.
Romero, on Twitter: "Juan M. Gonzales apologized for the cancellation of OSWC." Romero also wrote that the region will support future editions of that conference.
Award
During today's conference, the European Commission's OSOR project was awarded the "'EC Prize Initiativa Focus' for to the best success story in Open Source Software". The award was handed to Francisco García Morán, Director General for the Directorate General of Informatics (Digit) at the European Commission. Ramón Ramón Sánchez, a open source IT consultant, on Twitter: "Garcia Moran: 'Free knowledge is summarised in: Generosity and Solidarity equals Progress'."
A second alternative for OSWC, a one-day meeting on free software IT business, took place yesterday in Malaga's conference centre. This conference was organised by Andalibre, an associations of IT service providers from Andalusia and Asolif, a federation of Spanish open source companies. The two got support from Cenatic and the city council of Malaga.
More information:
Identica notices tagged with forofocus
Internautas news item on the cancelling of the Open Source World Conference (in Spanish)
Barrapunto item on the cancelling of the Open Source World Conference (in Spanish)
Initativa Focus (in Spanish)
Libre Software World Conference (in Spanish)
Open Source World Conference (in Spanish)