On the last two days (October 23rd and 24th) I went to one of the best events in my academic life until today. FSOSS, that standards for Free Software and Open Source Symposium, is and event that brings developers, businesses, academics and students to talk about Open Source, its characteristics, tools, enterprises and the researches done about it. I’ll talk a little bit about the talks that I went, who were the presenters, their ideas, the differences and similarities between them and my overall view. I was a volunteer on the first day in the morning, so I had the opportunity to talk with many people, including speakers while making their registrations.
October 23rd – First day of event.
The first presentation I went on Thursday was David Humphrey‘s keynote about the heartbleed bug. David is a Seneca’s teacher who leads the Open Source class I take and he have been contributing with open projects for many years. I would like to highlight that I really liked it and that David did a presentation in a such simple way that made me really impressed. The FSOSS’s public is not just programmers, there are also businesses, academics and others and even when he talked about bytes and codes, I’m really sure everybody could understand. Anyway, about heartbleed: in 1998, OpenSSL (secure sockets layer) was written and, later on, 66% of all servers were using it. In 2011 a heartbeat extension was added, where it was possible to verify the connection of other users. In 2013 17% of users had added the extension. In 2014 a Google researcher discovered a bug. It was a mistake when sending memory’s content in this “keep alive” extension, where the amount of memory had no limits to be asked. Two really interesting things that David addressed were the fact that a tool is just noticed when it is not ready to be used or in this case, the problem was only seen after tons of people had their privacy corrupted. He also spoke about how a relative small Open Source project, that has 15 people working on it can be so big and reach so many people.
The second presentation I went was conducted by Mekki MacAuley, who I already know so I already had the chance to listen some of the opinions he has about Open Source before. His presentation was about Mozilla Intellego, a machine translation that is being developed. This was a presentation in which I was really interested, once I’m getting involved with translation at Mozilla. It is an open project that has contribution from different communities and that has integrated to it other projects, such as amaGama, a web interface. One big point of the machine translation is to break the barriers that language has nowadays on internet, trying to make information available even on languages spoken by a small portion of people. You can read more about the presentation here. There are many ways to help, in technical and non technical areas, such as API hacking, web services, feedback machine, community relation, evangelism, research and corporate maintenance documentation. You can find the bugs here and you can find people on IRC (#intellego on irc://irc.mozilla.org/).
The third and last presentation I went on Thursday, conduct by Gaber Lasalo, was named “Open Source, what does it stand for?”. I was expecting something different from what I saw and I think that he tried to embrace lots of subjects, making it a little bit simple when it could have been focused in one aspect. Gaber talked about the difference between free software and open source and that it doesn’t always come together, a bit about the balance that open source projects should have when it comes to security, functionality and ease of use. He also talked a bit about the Cloud Computing Manifesto and how it should be open, about Prezi and other open versions such as Sozi and Emaze. Another interesting thing he addressed was that people use open source not even knowing about it.
Due to the lenght of this post, I decided to divide it in two parts. On the second one, I’ll talk about the second day’s event and give my final conclusions. You can see it here.
Cheers!
