President of Croatia Ivo Josipović appreciates the creative and innovative spirit of the open source community. "What you are doing is something good, creative and innovative", he was quoted as saying, while opening the Croatian Linux Users' Convention 2013 in the country's capital Zagreb yesterday. "Most importantly, open source helps to strengthen democracy."
According to the organisers, President Josipović also expressed his "complete support" for the government plans to implement open source and open standards in the public sector's IT.
The government last month announced the creation of a working group to help the government with its plans. The group is hosted by the Ministry of Public Administration and the Ministry in the Office for e-Croatia. The working group will be led by Kristijan Zimmer, who at the University of Zagreb heads the IT support centre at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing. Zimmer is the former president of HrOpen, one of two major open source and open standards advocacy groups in Croatia.
Other talks at the conference yesterday included a presentation on the European Commission's activities with regards to open source and open standards. The presentation was given by Karel De Vrient, who recently retired after being responsible for the implementation of the European Commission's IDABC programme and its successor, the ISA programme. Joinup is one of the activities of ISA.
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Croatian Linux Users' Convention 2013
Joinup news item
Joinup news item