I attended a 2 days event on Open Source held at Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I took the monorel for the first time. Not bad.
Clearly evident was the numbers of participants. This could be due to TechEd event going on simultaneously in KL. The numbers for TechEd estimated over 1000 while Open Source had less than 300 participants. On the second day, most sessions was attended no more than 50 people.
But the food was good. They really spend money to feed everyone. I don't think you can get that at TechEd.
I found the content of the symposium to be interesting to a certain extend however the selection of title and the quality of speakers was poor. There were only a few select exceptional speakers such as Shane Owenby - Red Hat APAC, Dinesh Nair - QubeConnect, Dr. Yusseri Yusoff - former Consulting Project Director for MAMPU and few others.
I can't comment on the rest of the talks which I didn't attend. Most speakers do not speak in passion about the technology nor offer new insight although everyone was knowledgeable. The talks was mostly catered for experienced Red Hat users or developers. No afford was taken to introduce the basics of Red Hat. I hope there will be more improvement in the following year.
The 2 days events had a tagline which was notable in every talk - TOC (Total Ownership Cost) and Vendor Lock In. Very Anti-Mircosoft atmosphere. The cool part was the presentation was done using a Linux OS notebook using OpenOffice (or was it Star Office?).
I am not a Open Source or Microsoft evangelist. To me, what is important is what technology that can deliver the requirements that I have in a productive, fast and efficient manner. If I have to pay for a software, then I will if it really helps my productivity. If Open Source can provide the same solution and helps my productivity, then by all means I will use it.
