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==Other Presentations==
I also went to a presentation about ARM chips and Open Source Graphics. The ARM presentation was quite technical and very hardware based. One of the great things about this presentation was that the presented were expecting to be speaking with people that new little to nothing about ARM, but over ¾ of the room knew a lot about ARM. This lead to a lot of great discussions throughout the presentation and some things the audience knew more about then the presenters. Some of these discussions even got a little heated with people having some different view points, which was pretty interesting to watch and be apart of.
The other presentation I went to about Open Source Graphics was also very interesting. The presenter mentioned how he grew up with GIMP, which is open source and how a lot of people use Photoshop. He made a point that if you try and get a tutorial on Photoshop you might get 67 results, but for GIMP you would get 37. He stressed it might take a little more time in GIMP, but that it could be done. He showed a lot of computer graphics and stressed how it was heavily math based. Everyone was really impressed and it created a good discussion, with the audience asking how easy it was to do something like that. He didn’t really provide a detailed response, which made me believe that is quite difficult to pickup compared to a lot of other development.
Overall, these two presentations presented me with a lot of things I didn’t know about and that I would be really interested in doing some more research on in the future.
==Comparison==
When comparing the two presentations that I discussed above I really felt that they were both really pushing open source. The first presentation I went to about processing.js did it a little more explicitly by just mentioning IRC and going into a lot of history of the technology. I felt Fred Dixon pushed open source a lot more and really mentioned all the advantages using/creating open source technology over closed source software. These being that when you are developing for a company everything has to be perfect before the software is released because people are paying for it and it has to work great. Then with open source since no one is paying money for the software they can focus on features that they or the community thought would be important, release the software and then get more requests or feedback and implement the new ideas.
==My Views==
Being in my fourth year at Seneca I have heard the word open source by a lot of different people, but no one has really gone into much detail about it. Taken this course this year has really showed me what open source is and what it has to offer because I really didn’t understand what it was all about until I took this course. I think it is a great thing that there is a community where you can go an ask questions at any point and receive prompt feedback. I also like that code is easily accessible, so there is a lot of stuff you can look at for help or even use in your own code. I also really like the fact that everyone is very friendly and eager to help. They also realize that people have a variety of experiences and are just happy to have more people helping with bugs. So far I have really enjoyed working on my bug and meeting many people on IRC. I think that this work is really enjoyable and when you are doing something you like it doesn’t even feel like you are working. I think this is really what open source is all about.
From these talks I felt that my feeling and views on open source was the same as the presenters. As I mentioned above everyone felt very welcoming and was eager to get everyone involved with their projects if they were interested. None of them bashed closed source projects, but they really showed some benefits that I didn’t even know about as to why working on open source projects is a lot better compared to closed source projects.
Now I also know from my experience with the bug I am currently working on it can also be a little tough sometimes to get answers from the community because everyone is very busy working on their own bugs. It can also be intimidating for new people as well because it is such a different environment to work in. Even having been in this class for almost 3 months, I still feel like there is so much more to learn.
Overall, I feel that open source is a great opportunity for anyone to get into just because it provides a great way to meet new people, become a better programmer and learn about new tools. From first hand experience there are many new tools that I have never heard of that people have told me to install when I am working with them on IRC. These are tools that we would never see in other classes and are very useful tools that should be more widely used.
==Conclusion==
Overall, I had a good time at FSOSS. I enjoyed the presentations I attended and the discussions that occurred during the presentations. If there was one critique I had about FSOSS it would be to not have the presentations overlap. There was always three presentations going on at the same time and the pamphlet given only provided a brief description of each one, so you just had to choose the one that sounded the best. I think it would be better if they even could run later or possibly go an extra day just so there would be an opportunity to go to all of the presentations and not have every presentation back to back.
Another possibility could be to have a little introduction before the first presenters start where all the presenters would come to a main room and just give a brief introduction about what they were going to be talking about just so the people who weren’t as familiar with everything thing would know if they would be interested in attending that presentation or not.
Just to wrap everything thing up, I’ll conclude by saying that I enjoyed my first time at FSOSS and would like to attend next year. I really do hope that they are able to fix the structure of the presentations next time to allow people to see more presentations. I know there is a lot of people attending and some people coming from far distance and it just seems that being able to see as many presentations as possible would be a nice thing. It would also give people a chance to go to a presentation they might have never thought of attending and wind up really enjoying it.