President praises Open Source conference in Sofia

Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov is voicing his support for the Open Source conference OpenFest, taking place in Sofia this weekend (27-28 October 2007). "Open Source technologies helps to solve important problems such as transparency and free civil access to public information," Parvanov wrote in a letter to the organisation in September 2007.

"This event will help for the popularisation of Open Source in Bulgaria," the president wrote in response to a request by the organisers to become the conference patron. Parvanov writes: "It is imperative today to popularise Open Source projects and to give them an institutional support. I support your ambition to popularise the sharing of knowledge, documentation and software, your ambition to ensure freedom of choice while encouraging all interested around you to do the same." Parvanov also writes Open Source projects should get governmental support. "Open Source programs help bridge the digital divide in our society."

About OpenFest

The OpenFest conference is held for the fifth time this year. The conference is organise by volunteers from various Bulgarian Open Source communities, such as the Open Projects Foundation, the Free Software Association Bulgaria, the Internet Society Bulgaria and Creative Commons Bulgaria. Admission is free.

The conference program is a mix of technical lectures on Open Source applications and development, presentations by businesses implementing Open Source and a forum on free culture. The event includes the annual conference on BSD, an Open Source operating system.

Topics include a presentation on how to configure a thin client infrastructure using the Linux Terminal Server Project, an outline on FreeBSD and its new network and transport protocols and a discussion on the uses of the Cluster File system.

Swedish Open Source developer and vice-president of the Free Software Foundation Europe Jonas Öberg will discuss Free Software business models, and Domas Mituzas, who works for MySQL AB, the Swedish company developing this Open Source database will discuss Wikipedia.

Admission to the conference is free.

All about OpenFest

OpenFest 2007 program