VANCOUVER, British Columbia – September 20, 1999 – Open Source is hot and several of the key people in the Open Source community will be presenting in Vancouver over the coming week. Tim O'Reilly, Open Source advocate and President of O'Reilly and Associates will be the guest speaker at the BC Technology Industry Annual General Meeting on Thursday 23rd September. That afternoon Richard Stallman, pioneer of the Free Software Foundation will present at a UBC/CICSR and Vancouver Linux Users Group hosted lecture.

Hot on the heels of the successful IPO by Linux vendor Red Hat Inc, Open Source is fast becoming the latest darling of investors and end users alike. Developers have long known of the benefits of Open Source. Its fast, flexible and stable nature that has helped them build the Internet. Now, the rest of the world is realizing that many of the Internet services, that they are increasingly relying on, are actually Open Source projects. E-mail delivery and web based queries are just two of the multitude of daily tasks that make use of Open Source technology.

"The Internet was built on the back of Open Source projects," commented Dick Hardt, CEO ActiveState. "Sendmail, Perl, Apache and Linux are all part of the puzzle that pulls the internet together as a tool that delivers results to vast numbers of people everyday."

ActiveState, a Vancouver based Open Source company, provides services, support and tools for Perl developers.

"Open Source development is thriving in Vancouver." Said Hardt. "We have a talented pool of developers and growing community of users. Stormix are another Vancouver company in the Open Source field, developing a distribution of Linux with a graphical focus. Now local investors and end users are understanding we are part of the high technology community here."