I'm enjoying my short stay in Luxembourg, even though the hotel that was booked for me turned out to be full, the taxi I took late last night was involved in a minor accident, and I managed to break my glasses. These are, of course, only minor irritants given that my hosts at Eurocontrol, the European organisation responsible for air safety, are such good company.
I was asked to speak to an audience of air traffic control trainers from around Europe about the advantages and disadvantages of open source and free software, a space usually occupied by my colleague Jane Hart. With an hour to fill, I had plenty of time for interactivity, so had each participant complete their own top ten software tools list, to see how many were free (quite a lot). I also asked for volunteers to represent those who were already strong advocates of open source and those who were deeply sceptical. I asked the advocates to use the hour to come up with arguments against open source, and for the sceptics to come up with positive arguments. I probably screwed them up psychologically with this exercise but the results were interesting.
The biggest challenge I set myself was to demonstrate features of Firefox, OpenOffice, Moodle, MediaWiki, Gimp, Audacity, eXe, FreeMind and Wink, some of which I had only recently downloaded. Needless to say, each of these demonstrations went without hitch. Only two applications let me down by causing bugs - Windows Explorer and Windows Media Player - which must say something about free software don't you think?
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