"Is Open Source Winning....."

Proposed by Elliot Smith from Open Advantage

Challenged by by Roger "Prof" Greenhalgh from National Rural.

This was the title for the new format debate. Elliot gave a very compelling speech about how Open Source was making very significant inroads into all aspects of computing from Desktop to Server and offered real commercial opportunity to both provider and customers.

Roger countered by highlighting the problems of interoperability with Open Source and how many years of Legacy windows will create inertia to folks using Open Source.

A vote was taken at the beginning

31% : Yes

31% : No

38% : Don't Know

After the debate:

50%: Yes

31%: No

19%: Don't Know.

A survey of two most favoured Open Source software was taken and the results are as follows:

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Eclipse                                                1

Firefox                                              11

Joomla                                                1

QMail                                                 1

Apache                                               1

OpenOffice                                         2

SSH                                                    1

Linux(Inc Unbuntu)                              2

Java                                                     3

.NetNuke                                            1

.Asp Starter Kit                                   1

Audacity                                              2

Paros                                                   1

Drupal                                                 1

Elgg                                                     1

PHP                                                    1

Google Maps                                       1

Rails                                                     1

Thunderbird                                          1

The above shows the spread of what people are using.

Thanks in particular to Elliot Smith and Roger Greenhalgh for their efforts, and others who made this such a successful event.

Edward Bedell 13/06/2007