Jumping Bean exhibited at the Software Freedom Day celebrations held by the South African government's Department of Science and Technology at their offices in the CSIR building in Pretoria.
Jumping Bean engages eager leaners
Jumping Bean gave out Java cd's, free popcorn (as in beer) and had many interesting and informative discussion with attendees. Jumping Bean also represented Sun Microsystems at the show. A lot of the attendees were from government departments, and it is encouraging to see the South African governments obvious commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
Derek Hanekom, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology gave the keynote address.
Throughout the day talks where given by various speakers. Unfortunatley we had to staff the stand so could not attend any :( The keynote speech was given by Derek Hanekom, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology. A full report on his speech can be found at Tectonic.
Interestingly enough Microsoft had a stand at the show. The messages they seemed to be giving out was "you either pay for the software or the service", implying the only difference between proprietary software and FOSS is the way it is "charged" for. Nothing was mentioned about standards compliance or easy of interoperability.
All in all it was a great day. Thanks to Karl Fischer for all the organising. We took some video footage and will upload to YouTube shortly.
