Asian open source summit moved to China

The organizers of Open Source Software Summit (OSSummit) Asia are now looking to hold the conference in mainland China.

The event, organized by the Apache Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation, was originally set to be held in Hong Kong in November last year, but was postponed due to the lack of response.

Charel Morris, producer of OSSummit 2008, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail last November: "We realized that we needed more time to connect with all the various [open source] communities throughout China and then in turn give them time to attend OSSummit," said Morris.

Shortly after the postponement last year, a spokesperson explained the delay was to give Chinese nationals "the time to gain access to Hong Kong"--a problem now theoretically avoided by moving the conference nearer to the Chinese participants.

Morris said the pre-conference training sessions will be dropped from the itinerary, but that the conference will "continue to be a technically oriented event with content presented by leaders in the open source community".

Morris had said in the earlier e-mail that "technical training for software developers is the prime motivation for this type of conference".

The OSSummit Web site states the conference will be moved to the middle of this year, although the exact date is not yet specified. Morris said the organizers are looking at dates which will not clash with the Olympic Games in August.

The event has been positioned as an idea-exchange between developers, vendors and users of open source, and lists sponsors such as Google, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems and Sybase, among others.