"Pingvinfest of 2010" — the Russia's first festival of Open Source solutions took place

The action devoted first of all to application solutions for the corporate sector based on the open source (OS) as well as was supposed, became the meeting place of experts of all IT market.

The festival was opened by the director of state programs of IBM East Europe/Asia Marat Guriev who after small welcome speech told about the international positioning of the countries and the companies in the market of Open Source, gave the interesting ratings and data of different researches. He noted close connection of level of distribution of Open Source with existence of state programs, the systems of preparation at schools and universities, with demand of these technologies business and society. According to him, at Russia good chances to take higher positions in the world ranking of the countries which are actively using Open Source, and the largest potential it is put in the actual implementation of state programs, increase in demand domestic Open Source technologies in business, a state administration and other areas here.

The CEO of PingWin Software company Komissarov Dmitry provided large Open Source projects, implemented in Russia in the last several years. He paid special attention to the analysis of the most popular beliefs connected with Open Source, having emphasized the next moments: 100% transition to Open Source is not possible, Open Source — does not mean free of charge, effectively it is possible to apply Open Source at the moment not everywhere. Advantages of Open Source solutions which define their choice Mr. Komissarov called scalability (without additional license payments), the high level of information security, independence of specific solution provider or services and also flexibility and high adaptivity (thanks to openness of the source code).

The CEO of IT company Yapparov Tagir devoted the performance to the overview of stages of formation of Open Source market and the business solutions provided on it and also told about key factors of market development of an Open Source-applications, having selected from them the following: development of functionality of Open Source platforms, requirement of economy, growth of quality of development, development of support system and training, increase in a maturity of Open Source market in general. It brought and the factors constraining development of this market. According to him, treat like those: limitation of marketing of an Open Source-applications, insufficient development of functionality, legal limits, insufficient onsite assistance and also possibility of use of alternative software.

The company executive GNU/Linuxcenter (Meson.Py) Frolov Pavel summed up some results of ten years' work on the Russian Open Source market. Having referred to these researches published by the OpenNet.Ru portal it gave assessment of the market of Open Source in 2009 (2.2 billion rubles) and forecasts for the next several years (in 2012 — 5 billion rubles). According to it, now Open Source solutions are most demanded by law enforcement agencies, state agencies, medicine, education, financial institutions, trade and production follow.

The panel discussion which took place after the performances was the brightest event of a festival. Not only the speakers sitting in presidium whom the academician Victor Ivannikov (the chairman of RASPO), Igor Ashmanov (the managing partner of Ashmanov and Partners company) and Mikhail Elashkin (the director of the company of Elashkin Research), but also audience from the hall joined became its participants. Such format allowed to consider the different points of view, to ask any questions and that the most important, to receive on them irrefragable answers. The discussion started in the hall continued also on the sidelines. By the way, the plenary discussion was broadcast in the Internet, and everyone joined its viewing.

Final part of Pingvinfest was devoted to submission of solutions and services in the field of Open Source. Participants at the event were addressed by representatives of companies BOSS-Referent, GNU/Linuxcenter, PingWin Software, Aplana Software and MBU "Center of Support of Education".

Throughout all festival in the foyer the exhibition of Open Source solutions in which 14 developer companies and suppliers of Open Source solutions and services from different regions of Russia participated worked.

Acted as organizers of "Pingvinfest of 2010" IT system integrator and the market leader of Open Source solutions of PingWin Software, partners became GNU/Linuxcenter, Aplana and Lenovo.

"Already now it is possible to tell that "Pingvinfest of 2010" equaled the hopes laid on it. I consider that participants could receive an objective picture of development of Open Source in Russia and the world — Dmitry Komissarov noted. — Separately I want to tell that thanks to a festival we managed to bring together representatives of many regional companies, to exchange with them views on the current situation on places, it is better to understand the standing tasks and to plan joint activities for promotion of Open Source in scales of the whole country. We as one of organizers are almost completely satisfied with results of the held festival and very much we hope that next year we will manage to make it even better. We are not going to be satisfied with what has already been achieved!"