Two years ago around now, I joined the Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT). Roughly speaking, this is Taiwan’s nongovernmental organization equivalent to the Free Software Foundation in the United States. I joined because I identify with free software.
This year I finally attended the membership meeting in person. Before going north from Tainan, I already knew the rough agenda, which was about the association’s annual work report and preparations for upcoming LibreOffice Asia-related events.
This year’s meeting room was rented from III. Only after walking over did I realize that STR Network, the company behind The Night Night Show, was also in this building. Entering the meeting room and sweeping my gaze around, I finally learned who the people behind Jason Tools and the Toy Utopia blog on the internet were: humans, nothing special.
The meeting began, and I saw the familiar KDE desktop on the projector… even the person who later came to talk about BSD systems was also using the KDE desktop.
LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 will be held in Taiwan this August or October. Should the association organize it independently, or should it be held together with COSCUP 2024? We will see how the chair coordinates it. Speaking of which, I also really want to go to COSCUP this year. If so, I can piggyback and show support. I hope it does not conflict with my Singapore itinerary. The association discussed that later they will also need to host travel itineraries for foreign guests… just thinking about it is complicated (puts on Tucker Carlson’s worried face). Better to focus on the program content.
Later, Taiwan’s LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 was confirmed to be held in August this year, from the 2nd to the 4th, for a total of three days.
The chair mentioned that LibreOffice is a popular activity in Latin America, where many countries take turns holding conferences (I suppose so, since Latin America even has FSFLA responsible for linux-libre kernel development), while Asia has relatively fewer, with only Indonesia, Japan, and Taiwan having hosted it. Hosting it in China or Hong Kong? Damn, I had better not say.
Today I learned an important viewpoint: when governments introduce LibreOffice software, what they should value is the “ODF” format, not obsess over the software itself. This is a concept advocated by the association chair after exchanges with foreign LibreOffice communities. Very interesting. The association also plans to promote ODF certification exams.
Small gossip: part of the Software Liberty Association’s funding comes from the Ministry of Digital Affairs. Recently, Audrey Tang was severely criticized by KMT legislators, and the DPP also wants to grab that cushy post, which may affect us. Shivering. But relax, our Taiwan People’s Party legislators support Audrey Tang a lot.
Worth mentioning is that today’s meeting also invited people handling AsiaBSDCon 2024. This conference focuses on sharing technical discussions around the BSD family, and many heavyweight foreign developers will come to Taiwan to lecture, such as discussions on the ZFS file system. It is all relatively technical stuff. The gentleman who spoke today is even a full-time engineer hired by the FreeBSD Foundation. Too awesome.
The FHIR medical system lecturer invited later in the meeting talked about things too professional for me to understand. Anyway, it is a privately organized group that can fill gaps left by the government, I guess.
Finally, I learned why the association’s Nextcloud service kept crashing when I used it last year. It turns out the association’s server host was placed at the chair’s home… only later did it migrate to a more formal server room. Great.
A new book explaining Linux system installation planned by a university professor was also quite interesting. Its content seemed like a mashup of Debian user manuals.
Final thoughts: ah, I reached above my station again into something that does not belong to me.
Although I have made some tiny contributions to the open source community, such as writing bug reports, helping translate software, donating support, and so on, my level is still far too different from everyone in the association. Many senior figures in the open source software world, university professors, influential people in industry, and government officials were present. If I had not lacked the chance to meet them before, I definitely would have brought books for them to sign.
I deeply feel my own smallness. As a humanities student, should I maybe start by joining a student club first instead…… I fell into the awkward situation of having almost nothing to talk about.
Next month there is also a regional meetup organized by the Taiwan People’s Party. Perhaps I am more suited to that more public-facing meetup.
