OMEN
02-02-2008, 11:54 AM
For Jonathan Oxer, the president of Linux Australia, today, the final day of the 2008 Australian national Linux conference is a day of fulfilment and also some sadness.
This is his last day in the post as, after three years, he has decided not to stand for election again.
The new president will be formally elected tomorrow (Saturday) morning when Linux Australia holds its annual general meeting but it is already an open secret that Stewart Smith, a senior software engineer with MySQL in Melbourne, will be taking over.
The mild-mannered Oxer said the best thing about his time as head of LA was the friendships he had made, to the extent that, "coming back to the conference every year has been like meeting an extension of my family."
He said that the one thing he had tried to do during his tenure was to get rid of the perception that any official activity could only be initiated by members of the committee.
And, he said, his initiative had succeeded to a large extent. One of the LA members, Paul Waypar, had come up with the idea of selling coffee - the kind that is bought from the grower at a decent price by OXFAM - to raise funds for LA. "He implemented it and it worked out fantastically well," Oxer said.
"And then another member, Michael Davies, came up with the idea of setting up a website on the lines of a planet to aggregate the blog postings of the members and that was implemented too," he said.
In fact, the perception has bothered Oxer so much that at tomorrow's AGM he has proposed a motion to rename the committee as the council.
"The word 'committee gives the idea that it is work-oriented whereas the term 'council' means that it is more representative," he said.
Oxer said there had been periods during the three years when he found himself stuck in the midst of conflict, with both parties being close friends.
At such times, he said that being a person of conciliatory nature himself, he had used the example of free and open source software and pointed out that the openness, sharing and diversity which characterised the software should also extend to the personal level.
Oxer said the one memory he would take away from the 2008 conference was the giving away of laptops by the One Laptop Per Child project to a number of developers.
This was done to enable them to develop anything they liked for the laptop; the project has as its aim the provision of easy-to-use laptops to poor children in a number of countries.
ITwire
This is his last day in the post as, after three years, he has decided not to stand for election again.
The new president will be formally elected tomorrow (Saturday) morning when Linux Australia holds its annual general meeting but it is already an open secret that Stewart Smith, a senior software engineer with MySQL in Melbourne, will be taking over.
The mild-mannered Oxer said the best thing about his time as head of LA was the friendships he had made, to the extent that, "coming back to the conference every year has been like meeting an extension of my family."
He said that the one thing he had tried to do during his tenure was to get rid of the perception that any official activity could only be initiated by members of the committee.
And, he said, his initiative had succeeded to a large extent. One of the LA members, Paul Waypar, had come up with the idea of selling coffee - the kind that is bought from the grower at a decent price by OXFAM - to raise funds for LA. "He implemented it and it worked out fantastically well," Oxer said.
"And then another member, Michael Davies, came up with the idea of setting up a website on the lines of a planet to aggregate the blog postings of the members and that was implemented too," he said.
In fact, the perception has bothered Oxer so much that at tomorrow's AGM he has proposed a motion to rename the committee as the council.
"The word 'committee gives the idea that it is work-oriented whereas the term 'council' means that it is more representative," he said.
Oxer said there had been periods during the three years when he found himself stuck in the midst of conflict, with both parties being close friends.
At such times, he said that being a person of conciliatory nature himself, he had used the example of free and open source software and pointed out that the openness, sharing and diversity which characterised the software should also extend to the personal level.
Oxer said the one memory he would take away from the 2008 conference was the giving away of laptops by the One Laptop Per Child project to a number of developers.
This was done to enable them to develop anything they liked for the laptop; the project has as its aim the provision of easy-to-use laptops to poor children in a number of countries.
ITwire