This year’s Australian Unix Users Group (AUUG) conference will strengthen its coverage of information security, including spam prevention and secure programming, in addition to the usual “grab bag” of technical content, according to president-elect David Purdue.

Following the resignation of Greg Lehey, Purdue, who was AUUG president for four years from 1998 to 2002, returned to the top job this month and plans to use this year’s conference to further promote the group as a resource for standards-based computing.

“The format of the conference will remain largely unchanged but as last year was open source focused, this year we will focus on security across closed and open source software,” Purdue said. “There has been a lot of change within AUUG over the past few years and my re-election will give continuity to the board.”

Purdue plans to re-focus AUUG’s activities which have been accused of going too far down the open source path.

“Although open source is of interest to members, it’s not the be all and end all of Unix and open standards,” he said. “Also under represented are free software users on proprietary Unix and that’s an important group. AUUG is the only body that represents proprietary Unix and we can remain relevant in the face of the BSDs and Linux as they are flavours of Unix. They adhere to POSIX standards and offer interoperability which is an advantage of standards-based computing.”

Purdue said there is an increasing number of professionals interested in standards-based computing who need a forum to exchange ideas and educate themselves better.

“Across all the different platforms we are coming across the same types of problems like security and spam. For similar platforms there are similar solutions,” he said.

Purdue conceded that AUUG’s membership is declining but is confident that can be turned around if the group continues to deliver value and gets that message out.

“We will continue to look at the best way to deliver value to the membership,” he said. “We will use the conference to promote the membership as it is cheaper to become an AUUG member and attend the conference than attending as a non-member.”

Following the success of the Australian Open Source awards for the past two years, AUUG 2004 will again host the awards, which recognise achievements across all areas of open source development.

Among the list of speakers at AUUG 2004 are international names like OpenBSD project lead Theo de Raadt and HP’s Linux CTO Bdale Garbee.

AUUG 2004 will be held from August 29 to September 3 at the Duxton Hotel, Melbourne. Early bird discounts for registration apply until August 6; however, registrations will be taken right up until the event. See http://www.auug.org.au for more information.