KUALA LUMPUR: Free and Open-Source Software (Foss) enthusiasts and practitioners will have the opportunity later this month to learn about the latest developments in the movement.

A grassroots-driven conference called Foss.my will bring together international Foss professionals and enthusiasts from Oct 24-25.

It will take place at the Asia Pacific University College of Technology & Innovation and the Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology, at the Technology Park Malaysia here.

Organised by the Malaysian National Computer Confederation, the conference will feature interactive talks from recognised experts.

Each talk will last between 30 and 45 minutes. There will be a feedback system that will allow more audience interaction during the sessions, the MNCC said.

On the speakers list is John Lim, principle developer of ADOdb, a widely used PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) database abstraction engine.

Also there is Richard Matthew Stallman, the father of the free software movement, who will be speaking on the movement and GNU/Linux.

Stallman is also the author of the most popular Foss copyright licence, the GNU General Public Licence, and principle author of many important contributions, such as the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Debugger, and Emacs text editor.

Two keynote speakers are Brian Aker and Dr Yusseri Yusoff. Aker is former director of architecture at software firm MySQL AB and contributor to many database projects, including Drizzle.

Dr Yusseri was a project director for the recently concluded government initiative known as The Malaysian Public Sector Open-Source Software Initiative, Phase 1. This is headed by the Malaysian Administrative Management and Modernisation Planning Unit.

One session of interest will see experts from free software projects such as KDE, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Drupal, discuss running Foss businesses.

The event is non-commercial and is run by enthusiasts and volunteers from the Foss world. It is funded by the industry, governments and the academia. A nominal entrance fee will be charged.

For more information, go to http://foss.my/registration/.