Sam Varghese
Friday, 01 February 2008 07:23
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
For Jonathan Oxer, the president of Linux Australia, today, the final day of the 2008 Australian national Linux conference is a day of fulfilment and also some sadness.
This is his last day in the post as, after three years, he has decided not to stand for election again.
The new president will be formally elected tomorrow (Saturday) morning when Linux Australia holds its annual general meeting but it is already an open secret that Stewart Smith, a senior software engineer with MySQL in Melbourne, will be taking over.
The mild-mannered Oxer said the best thing about his time as head of LA was the friendships he had made, to the extent that, "coming back to the conference every year has been like meeting an extension of my family."
He said that the one thing he had tried to do during his tenure was to get rid of the perception that any official activity could only be initiated by members of the committee.
And, he said, his initiative had succeeded to a large extent. One of the LA members, Paul Wayper, had come up with the idea of selling coffee - the kind that is bought from the grower at a decent price by OXFAM - to raise funds for LA. "He implemented it and it worked out fantastically well," Oxer said.
"And then another member, Michael Davies, came up with the idea of setting up a website on the lines of a planet to aggregate the blog postings of the members and that was implemented too," he said.
