NewsForge: Open Source in Government Conference Wrapup

“The Open Standards/Open Source for National and Local
eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU conference held in
Washington DC March 17-19 was attended by nearly 500 people, not
counting speakers. Microsoft representatives made a presentation
about their Shared Source program, and that drew a handful of
protesters, but both Microsoft and the protestors were minor
sideshows that had little to do with the ‘meat’ of the
conference.

“Microsoft’s people were questioned harshly by the audience, and
answered with PR-style sidesteps, maintaining over and over that
only a tiny percentage of users ever want to look at a program’s
source code, and that an even tinier percentage would ever need or
want to change it.

“The only truly amusing moment came when a Microsoft person
talked about how Microsoft Word adhered to open standards by giving
users the option of saving in many standard formats, including
HTML…”

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