(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

Probably the most important conference in Romania on open source and free software took place at the end of the last week - on 18-19 May 2007 in Brasov. The eLiberatica 2007 conference was organized by a new group of IT specialists called Romanian Open Source and Free Software Initiative (ROSI).

The conference aimed at bringing community leaders from around the world to talk about the hottest topics in FLOSS movement demonstrating the advantages of adopting, using and developing Open Source and Free Software solutions.

The international participants that included Monty Widenius, the main engineer and supervisor of MySQL, Brian Behlendorf, one of the Apache Project initiators or Zak Greant, representing Mozilla Foundation, provided a high level view on the entire FLOSS movement including business, social and technical aspects.

Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ systems explained how open source development can be used in creating a successful business and the presentations from the Romanian speakers showed examples of locally developed open source products from ERP/CRM solutions to Open Source for Public Libraries or VoIP solutions.

The use of open source software and open standards in public administration were highlighted by Georg Greve (president of Free Software Foundation Europe) in its presentation on the necessity of adopting open standards and supporting them at the national level as well. A practical example on adopting FOSS in public administration was shown by Jim Willis, Director of eGovernment and Information Technology from Rhode Island.

As some of the Romanian participants pointed out, the Romanian Government preferred until now proprietary software and technologies (with closed source code) at very high prices, "making Romania directly available to foreign corporations and paying hundreds of millions of Euro from public money as licenses."

The necessity for a better-organized open source community was highlighted by Bogdan Manolea from EDRI-member APTI Romania, who presented the obstacles the Romanian copyright legislation creates for open source developers and why the open source community should react to those actions supposed to "fight piracy" of the authorities.

A similar message was projected by Lucian Savluc, the main organizer of the event, who promoted ROSI as a good framework where the Romanian open source community can be gathered, if there is support, work and involvement. The first step will be the creation of a public portal that will present all the Romanian activities related to FOSS, both in Romanian and English. Other projects will follow as well.

Eliberatica 2007 Conference (18-19.05.2007)
http://eliberatica.ro/2007/

About ROSI and eLiberatica - past, present and furture (only in Romanian, 20.05.2007)
http://www.cianblog.com/2007/05/20/conferinta-eliberatica-despre-rosi-...

Open technologies bring transparency in government, development and knowledge (only in Romanian 22.05.2007)
http://politic.ngo.ro/?cmd³³0³=i-223-28702

Laws and Open source (only in Romanian, 22.05.2007)
http://legi-internet.ro/blogs/index.php?title=open_source_si_legi_desp...