Arjen started off by explaining why he thinks that software is important. About as important as the first book press. The creation of synthetic life earlier this has reduced the problem of life to a software problem, a very complex software problem, but a software problem non-the-less.

One day, after Arjen noticed that the main Dutch railway website could only be used with Internet Explorer he decided to write the railway and several Dutch politician, he got requested to put in a proposal for a Dutch law pushing open source software as a government policy. Since the Dutch government does 12% of Dutch software spending, they should lead by example. This bill got passed, partly because the day before it got known that Microsoft had a nett. margin of 92% on Windows.

The Netherlands import 7,800,000,000 Euro of software each year. For that kind of money the Dutch government could employ as much programmers as Microsoft who would all be Dutch and paying taxes in the Netherlands.

Using open standards is like using shipping containers. There is no need for specialized transport, shipping or loading procedures.

Essentially you could use open source for almost anything. For commodity applications there are open source alternatives available for almost all programs. For specialized software, software written for a single customer for a specific job, open source just requires that the contract demands that the source is opened up.

Unfortunately, the last war was not fought with the passing of the bill, because while government where switching from Word to OpenOffice, they were also implementing SharePoint as their document management system.

Interoperability does not mean moving everything to the cloud. Does you really want all you government data to be in a cloud run by a company which is based in another country?

The global economic meltdown is actually a positive impulse for open source, even tough the reason may be wrong. “Never waist a good crisis.”

Laws & policies in modern nations are implemented through software and supporting computer systems. Control over these systems is control over the government. Microsoft being able to shut down all government PC’s running windows is now a matter of national security.

In Europe a change is happening. The French gendarme has moved over to open source software and the German government has declared that Open Source software maintenance was cheaper then commercial software.

Slide deck is here: http://bit.ly/bXmb2f

Arjen’s blog is here: http://www.kmphs.com/

On the 19th of November Frank Breedijk announced that Jason Mansfield, who runs the website http:/clinicallyawasome.com, has won the contest by sending in the name Seccubus. A bottle of Vueve Clinquot champaing will be sent to him shortly.

The author has provided the following explanation of the name Seccubus:

Seccubus is a mythical creature that helps security professionals analyze and report the results of, repeated, vulnerability scans. Like its distant cousins the Succubus and Incubus the Seccubus is also a creature of the night. At night, or any other scheduled time, the Seccubus draws its energy from repeatedly performing vulnerability scans  of infrastructures until the vulnerabilities become exhausted or die.
The Inseccubus is the male counterpart of the Seccubus. While the Inseccubus draws his life energy from the assessor by repeatedly requiring him to (re-)analyse the same findings, the Seccubus get her energy from pleasing the assessor by reducing the number of findings by means of delta reporting.

The name Seccubus was chosen from a list of over 50 ideas sent after the contest was announced via the AutoNessus.com website, Hacker Public Radio, Paul dot com and various other social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

“I wanted a name that was completely different from AutoNessus” said Frank Breedijk, explaining why suggestions like AutoVAS and AutoVAMP where turned down. Other suggestions where turned down because their name was already taken on media like twitter (e.g. VAsak, Vulnerability Assessment Swiss Army Knife) or “simply because I didn’t like them” (e.g. Mick Douglass is awesome).

Now that the new name has been announced the “rebranding” will be complete before the end of the year. The website www.seccubus.com is already live but still points to the AutoNessus.com site. Also Frank’s twitter account, @autonessus, will be renamed to @seccubus soon.

The response to the renaming contest was overwhelming and we would like to thank everybody who participated.