GTEC Canadian Gorvernment Technology Showcase

Hi Colan…

Thanks for your comments about GTEC and your interest in OpenPlus.ca. I certainly agree that we need more “unity” for such large venues, as advocacy is expensive!

Our booth certainly attracted some die hard OSS fans, I’ve heard mind numbing stories from gov IT managers telling me their frustrations with executive barriers simply because they are not well informed.
OpenPlus.ca is a recent joint effort consisting of freelancers and other OSS firms, and more importantly has strong relationships with Ajilon Consulting… which bring procurement avenues for government projects including their NMSO.

I must say that we are not exclusive to promoting Drupal or LAMP based solutions, as we currently have active projects in 5 provinces revolving around 4 different OSS projects. That said, I’m glad to see strong presence for Drupal in Ottawa (through many people’s efforts and events; like Mike Gifford and his team at openconcept for the Gov Showcase).

We don’t support commercial opensource (e.g. only the CE edition of SugarCRM), so we might be better to advocate under FLOSS versus OSS (to inform our clients of the fundamental differences and impacts of commercial presence in OSS).
FYI: The only Conference at GTEC titled Open Source was hosted by Microsoft – Case and point! Does that sound like an oxymoron to anyone else!?? (Looks like GTEC also missed the dash in Open Source).

In response to your points;
1 – Correct! I missed that from the marketing team. (Already corrected, thanks)
2,3 – We reference only the OSS projects which we support and advocate, which in this case… yes are all GNU/GPL, which in turn are governed by OSI. (I’ll ask our marketing team to possibly emphasis that, that said... we are already working on a new version for our website, including content).
4 – As for the grammar of the word open-source, this is a debate beyond this forum. Drupal documentation often refers to it as open-source (but not always), yet other OSS apps like Plone which we also advocate seem to refer to as "open source", we've seen other do "OpenSource", "Open Source", "opensource" etc.

Are you based in Toronto, does OpenJect.com do only Drupal?
(Please, no mention of last night’s game!!) lol