This week I posted about FSOSS and as I said, I had to write two different posts due to the length of the first one. You can see the first post here.
The event’s second day was also nice. I went to three different talks and two keynotes. The first keynote was conducted by Bob Young, Red Hat co-founder. He didn’t talk about a specif topic, but he addressed some really nice things. I liked the way he spoke about learning and life experience, how the Open Licenses were good and bad for him, depending in the position he was (user/businesses). What really call my attention was when he said that on the beginning he couldn’t understand how was possible to support technology with altruism and after all that became what he was doing too. The thing about giving away a piece of code and receiving much more back is something he addressed and other people did so too during the event. What you receive back is much more you could code by yourself. A last thing I could link with the Open Source classes I take was when he talked about maintenance. Someone in the public asked what to do when you see an Open Source project that is not being updated but you really wanted it to improve and Bob answered that you should do it yourself. That reminded me about this post that shows the contrast between the cathedral and the bazaar styles where Raymond shows his trajectory in taking a “abandoned” project and maintaining it by himself.
The second talk I went was conducted by Kieran Sedgwick and was called “Web Maker’s Tech”. He embraced some really nice topics in web developing, such as audio, 2D and 3D canvas, coloring and others, in a very simple way,. I’m not a web developer yet, but I could understand pretty much everything. A nice point he addressed was that apps written in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript are powerful enough to run in mobile and desktop computers, even in different systems and hardware configurations.
The second keynote had Chris Aniszczyk talking about the open source on Twitter. His presentation is available to be seen. I really liked it and the way he put in topics how they roll open source. It was also really interesting to see how Twitter grew and how bugs were solved, like overloading access.
The fourth talk I went was conducted by Regnard Raquedan that works for Mozilla, called “Creativity with Firefox OS”. That went different than I though it would be, but it was interesting. Regnard worked with some activities to show us how to accept new things, how to not worry about mistakes instead using them as a source for new ideas. Them he showed some devices running Firefox OS, a Mozilla operational system that target in emerging markets. (I will talk more about this in a post about my translating projects).
Last talk I wen was about cloud computing and the software OpenStack. Kent Poots showed how to use this tool step by step. I’m pretty new in this area and I was expecting some more technical information about cloud computing itself what made me a little bit lost.
As a conclusion, I think that there is a main idea that people have when using/working with open source, in instance the amount of code received is much larger than it could be coded by a small team; there is no way a enterprise pay for the number of people that collaborates on Open Source; Open doesn’t mean free and so on. I couldn’t see a point that had too big divergence between speakers. I think that everybody that is into Open Source have a similar think in the point I cited above but when going to points like licenses, price, tools, availability, release time and “secret sauce” (cited on Chris presentation), each person has a different point of view. Most of the points I said here and what I saw on the event are similar to mine, I’m still building my opinion, once I just started studying and using it conscious that I was. Anyways, I really like the idea of opening code, sharing it with the public, that is who will be able to show the many different uses and bugs that a program can have. I agree with licenses that give the right to use, modify and do whatever you want with the code with the condition that what you do with it is still open source and I don’t think that everything needs to be free. More than that I’m still not having a concrete opinion
Cheers!
