Philippines Open Source Summit Day One

So, it's another day on the field. Typhoon "Frank" is no where in sight here in Cebu but the damage is imminent all-over the new.

A new day comes as I woke up early this morning, prepared myself, and finally entered the realm of an Open Source event here in the Philippines.

Stage Decor/Setup

Held in one of the Philippine's top cities, Cebu is the heart of the first Open Source Summit (or is it? ehem) held at the Cebu International Convention Center.

Event Ticket with meal stubs

Fast Facts:

• Mandaue City (where CICC stood) is a reclaimed area.
• CICC construction was completed on 2006 (with a budget of approx. $10M)
• CICC is near the San Miguel Corporation(Cebu Plant) and the Cebu Doctors University
• Many participants from different I.T. companies (Oracle, Sun, MS, etc.) attended the Cebu Open Source Summit
• Attendees/Particpants were between 150-300
  

Head upstairs and enter the door to the right please

What I did not know then that I knew now:

• Microsoft supports open source and has a dedicated web site for it
• There are plenty of Filipino/Multinational companies that are "in the closet" and uses open source whole-heartedly.
• In open source, there's also a "purist" and "agnostic" followers/believers.
• There's a "P" generation somewhere out there (I probably misconceived what it actually means during the talks)
• There are plenty of Koreans in Cebu (arg, there's a friendly Korean in every sight)
• Oracle (Phils. and international) widely supports open source technologies <-- a rather intriguing fact if you ask me
• MySQL is brewing their enterprise database-related services (hence it was bought by Sun for approx $1B)
• And
  

What I loved the most:
Open or Close Discussion Panel -- where a representative from IBM, ..., and MS (yes believe it yourself until your utmost discontent but YES) discuss crucial information about what being "open" and being "close" is and how they work together in the industry. In short --> open source vs. closed source redefined <-- to finally debunk the misconceptions that surrounds the whole concept of "open source".


At the end of the day, participants found themselves bound with information overload... SERIOUSLY. Try listening to highly technical stuff all-day and you will get yourself disoriented guests :p

Truth to the fact --that the first day was very successful. Very informational indeed.

To those participants who suffered from mild headaches, Biogesic lang yan.