Thai open source/linux expo 10-11 May 2004
 

Not strictly LUG related but I have found out that on May 10-11 the Queen Sirikit Convention Center, Bangkok will hold the 6th annual Thai Open Source/Linux symposium.

I live and work in Thailand, but I am not Thai, and there is a lot of excitement amongst Thais about open source things because the cost/lack of security of an M$ alternative is prohibitive for most regular working people here.

Although generally speaking most computer users here are not especially computer literate they are extremely open minded, so they will stick with what they learn on. A point not missed by M$ because when the Thai government launched a program in association with HP to provide discount computers for the masses M$ reversed a long standing policy and slashed the prices of XP and Office because the government planned to use open source software on the discount machines

Quite a lot of publicity was generated by the Pladao office project which ported Star Office into Thai, and there is a distro called Linux TLE (pron. talay) which I understand is based on RedHat and it is possible to buy lap-tops and desktops in most department stores with TLE pre-installed at the moment :)

Anyhoo, if any LQ'ers are going to be at Soon Sirikit on 10th or 11th please e-mail me and we'll hook up for a beer/coffee etc :)

mark

Since this isn't about LUGs, I am moving it to General.

If anyone else would like to mention an expo, I'd suggest creating a thread in General.

Thanks for the info.

Thanks XavierP, sorry for posting in the wrong place.

mark