OtaSoft

Earlier this month I gave a presentation about
open source software (aka OSS, Free Software, or FLOSS)
at a conference near Washington, DC.
You can now download the
March 2007
presentation “Open Source Software” in PDF format; you can also get it in
OpenDocument
format.
For the OpenDocument version, make sure you
have the fonts you need.
Those are just the slides; I’ve separately made the
audio available in several formats:
[OGG (Vorbis)],
[MP3], and
[FLAC].
You should be able to understand the presentation just from the audio,
but looking at the slides while listening to the audio is even better.
For the audio,
I recommend using the Ogg Vorbis format - it’s the smallest file, and it
has very good quality.
The FLAC format is lossless, and is useful for recoding later
(it’s much smaller than WAV or AIFF while still not losing anything).
The MP3 format is useful if your player can’t handle Ogg Vorbis yet
(complain to your manufacturer!) - while MP3 is an ISO standard, MP3 isn’t
an open standard because it’s patent-encumbered.

The conference was titled
“Open Source - Open Standards - Open Architecture”, and was put on
by the non-profit
Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI)
(a member of the NDIA family of associations).
A lot of people were particularly surprised to learn that
essentially all open source software (FLOSS) are commercial
off-the-shelf (COTS) software, a point I make in more detail in
my essay
‘Commercial’ is not the opposite of Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS).
Basically, the U.S. government’s own laws (particularly Title 10 section 101) and regulations (particularly the Federal Acquisition Regulation)
make it clear that nearly all open source software is
commercial off-the-shelf (COTS).
There are two kinds of COTS software products: proprietary software and
open source software.

Original post by David A. Wheeler’s Blog and software by Elliott Back