GeekPAC

I read the early transcript of Szulik’s keynote from day 1 of OSBC 2007. I was heartened to hear this bit on open formats in general:

Governments around the Globe are putting money into thinking about and implementing open standards, such as ODF.

It’s good to see companies like Red Hat wholly supporting open standards. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it also makes perfect business sense for a company like Red Hat. Perhaps Mr. Szulik would be so kind as to sign the BytesFree.org pledge and promise not to lock users into closed formats.

Edit: I just noticed this post at LinuxQuestions.org where Jeremy notes one other aspect of Szulik’s keynote: social responsibility:

In his [Szulik's] opinion he feels that Open Source also has a social responsibility component. He gives as an example a research institute that had to ditch a decade of breast cancer research due to data incompatibilities

More companies and CEO’s could learn from this example. Add that to the long list of examples for why we need open standards and legal protection of information access rights.