I'm at JHB International at the moment, waiting three hours until my boarding due to some transport arrangement mismatches. Nevertheless, I'm here because I was at the Open Enterprise one-day-conference run by ITWeb, held at The Forum at Dimension Data's The Campus.

Me first, I suppose - I was the last speaker, and it didn't go particularly well. I guess I wasn't speaking on something I've had many discussions on, and I chose a hard way to introduce the topic. A few initial mis-steps, but apparently I was a bit better later in the presentation.

Strangely, even though I've talked in front of many more people than this group, I had a bit of stage-fright and couldn't even start moving, for fear I'd forget where I was in my presentation. The Microsoft employees sniggering and chatting and making comments whenever I made any of my more salient points was not particularly useful.

But I survived, and I made a few contacts.

The rest of the talks were all reasonably good with one exception. The highlights probably being Willie Appel's opening (very at ease, obviously done this many times before, convicted about the subject, and so forth) and Philip Stander's real-life case study about the use of Linux at MTN (one of the two bigger mobile/cellular providers in South Africa); he gave lots of interesting detail and worthwhile graphs and statistics. But it probably went over most of the audience's heads.

The exception was Gerrit van Gaalen's "legal" talk about Open Source. He shows a lack of understanding of some of the basic terms (no-one calls Free Software "freeware"), and most of his points regarding risk of Open Source applies similarly to proprietary software. He conflated the copyleft requirements with Open Source in general - which, if the people involved are actually in a position to do so, could mean them using FUD to fight use of BSD/LGPL-licensed development libraries in their organisation. In the .NET and more so in the Java environment, some of the most-used development libraries are non-copyleft licensed Open Source.

The panel discussion was interesting, and very entertaining with Stafford Masie of Novell taking a few digs at Microsoft's misinformation campaign "Get The Facts", and Oracle's Mohamed Cassoojee backing him up on Linux-as-platform being ready for the enterprise. Stafford, and Casoojee to a lesser extent, also didn't focus on Linux and on the reasons why the Open Source ecosystem produces some software very well. Stafford's main point is that the business risk involved in choosing Linux applies only if you don't work with a vendor-partner like Novell, RedHat (and, say, ImpiLinux) to mitigate them.

The Microsoft representative was mostly cool and collected, but showed his proprietary software roots by saying that only proprietary software development and building-once-selling-millions-internationally will uplift South Africa. The problem, perhaps, is that the market is pretty full on that side, and your platform-partner may turn into your competition any day (potentially bundling the functionality of your software into their platform...

Also, I think he forgets that most development is still custom/bespoke development and much is heading towards utilising a (higher-level) platform to be able to build services according to your client (possibly yourself) business needs.

Of course, I'm not the one he's expecting to convince. Afterwards at the networking cocktail party, I overheard a bit of what he said, and I was quite amused at how the tone changes when not on stage.