Invited as keynote speaker to OSCON Vienna

Recently I've been invited to give the keynote at OSCON Vienna (please note that this conference, to the best of my knowledge, has absolutely no relation with the O'Reilley OSCON events).

I'm honored and I'll gladly accept this invitation. AFAIR this is the first time I'll be giving the keynote at any FOSS related conference. The subject was up to me to determine, and I decided about something that is both one of the most important subjects for FOSS today, and well within the subject of the conference: "Kommerz und Community: Schnittstelle zwischen den Welten". It's about the interface between FOSS community and the commercial IT industry.

There are many suboptimalities at this interface. I personally believe that optimization of this interface would greatly benefit FOSS as a whole. Which issues am I talking about? Well, first of all, there are lots of GPL/licensing related issues. But even more importantly, there is the lack of support from the hardware community. As long as hardware vendors will actively hamper FOSS development by not releasing documentation, locking down their products, claiming they "support" Linux with their proprietary binary-only drivers.

For many of these issues, there's a big communication and furthermore cultural problem. That's what I want to address in that keynote.

There's another good point to the OSCON invitation: The trip to Vienna will also help me to improve my bad luck and stupidity while doing photography in Vienna / June 2005.