Open Source Health Software Conference

So I have two small news items.

First, I am renaming the yearly Houston Open Source Conference from fosshealth to OSHealthCon, which just stands for Open Source Health Software Conference. Why the name change? Well, it is caused by the need for me to distance myself from the term “free”. I know what “free” means when you are talking about software, but again and again, the term is abused by people with a proprietary agenda.

People would talk about the differences between “free software” vs “commercial software” implicitly insulting any professional who wants to use freedom-respecting licenses.So I am throwing in the towel. I am not going to fight this battle any more. At some point, I have to decide if I am going to advocate for freedom, or for one particular way of talking about freedom.

The other important news item is that I have started posting the 09 Videos up to www.OSHealthCon.com.

This is our first stab at videoing our own conference, and the results are just as amateurish as you might expect. Still, if you can tolerate the sound, there is a tremendous amount of insight available there.

I will be posting new videos there as I sort out how to make blip.tv transcoding work on GNU/Linux.

-FT