User:Jsdoodna/FSOSS 08

FSOSS 2008

Introduction

I had the opportunity of attending the 7th annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) held at Seneca@York, it is a meeting of students, developers, employees and anyone interesting in the open source community to come and promote their views. There are several different tracks of presentations going on throughout the two day conference, as well as several workshops. Throughout the two days I attended some amazing presentations, which really opened my eyes to how influential open source is becoming. The two most interesting presentation to me was the Open Source Design talk on Design Tools, and the TOS@FSOSS Community Perspective which is a panel of industry professionals speaking about open source as a teaching tool.

Open Source Design

I was looking forward to going to the presentation on Open Source Design, and upon its conclusion I was very excited about all the design tools presented, and couldn’t wait to get home to try them out. Brendan Sera-Shriar is the owner of BackSpaceStudios, and was the main speaker, and Geoff Palin is the Technical Director also at BackSpaceStudios. Brendan was probably one of the best presenters that I had seen at FSOSS, he broke the talk down into several parts, design tools available, a detailed explanation of those design tools and their comparable closed-source counterparts, applications of the tools, and communities available to get into design. Some of the tools presented where the GIMP photo editor, which I am familiar with, and how it compares to Adobe Photoshop, as well as a product I am not familiar with, CinePaint, which is a production quality editor, and a fork of GIMP. Inkscape is a vector-based graphics editor introduced, which I was very interested in, having used Xara Xtreme, I needed something free to create icons for websites. Drupal was another project which I have heard of, but never knew what it really was, a Content Management System! I noticed through each project, Brendan was showing us how each of these open source tools where being used in the industry, and I was very surprised to see that programs like Blender 3D have been used in motion pictures like Spiderman 2. He also showed us a preview for a short film, called Big Buck Bunny, and the quality is indistinguishable from something produced from Pixar. Brendan is also the founder of PHUG, an open source community where designers and developers can meet, and promote the open source culture. They actively conduct workshops for various open source design projects, and I actually found it surprising that many of those workshops are held at Seneca@York. Brendan’s point through the presentation is that the open source community is growing, and it is spanning areas once dominated by closed source, proprietary programs. He made a point that when he was younger he never had the opportunity to have such powerful programs at his disposal, because they cost thousands of dollars, but now thanks to the open source movement anyone can download for free Hollywood production quality software, and create something amazing from their home. Clearly through his views and knowledge, Brendan is a supporter of Open Source, and by having created PHUG movement, he has proven to be an active user and contributor to the open source community. He has also shown us that mainstream production houses are slowly moving to open source, not only because they can help keep costs down since they are free, but because they are just as, or more powerful than many commercial products in use today. He also encourages people to get involved with the community, offering suggestions, not only to attend PHUG, but also Wordcamp, and contribute to OSFlash, and Flashpress.

TOS@FSOSS – The Community’s Perspective

I thought that this talk was a very interesting approach to getting the views and opinions from the community about what teach open source in institutions means for the industry. This talk consisted of a panel of some of the open source community leaders, Luigi Ferrara is the director of the School of Design at George Brown College; Paul Frields is a Project Leader at Fedora; Frank Hecker is staff member at the Mozilla Foundation; Jon Hall is the Executive Director at Linux International; and Arthur Ryman is the Chief Architect at IBM for the Rational’s Project and Portfolio Management Solution. From the panel alone I knew that this was going to be a good talk, and I find it amazing that such important people in the Open Source community made time to attend FSOSS. Arthur Ryman talked mostly about how IBM was involved with the community, where Eclipse and Apache has been adopted by Linux, and the open source community has contributed in making products like Eclipse extremely powerful. He also noted that IBM acknowledges the open source movement, and are aligning their goals to where they believe software is going. Arthur also made a point in saying that he believes that open source is a great way to collaborate with others, showing to me at least that he is a strong believer and supporter in the development of open source technologies. Paul Frields discussed issues of Open versus Closed Source, and how to get involved, mentioning that open sources is building the infrastructure of participation, which is essential for strong community involvement. He also noted ways to start helping the community, which is simply by helping to document applications, or just filing bugs. I found Paul to be an active in the open source community, while he may or may not contribute, he certainly wants people to get involved, and help, as there is no shortage of work to be done. From the Mozilla Foundation, Frank Hecker reiterated some of the points made by Paul Frields, which the community can only grow through contribution. Bug filing, testing and QA are simple issues at Mozilla, and for people who don’t know how to get involved in the open source community, they are the best places to start. Frank is a firm believer in open source, and he wants others to join him, and promote open source. He believes that if someone is interested in contributing to the community, there many places to start, it’s not just developing some application and deploying it out into the wild. There was a discussion on how open source is becoming a part of institutions, and integrated in education, clear anyone attending Seneca would notice the amount of open source software on any of the computer available to students. Institutions are not only consuming open source content, but they are also developing it. There was the issue where Luigi Ferrara was developing a time table scheduling system with one of his students, and while the program worked, they were unable to implement it, for reasons at the College level. However from the audience, which consisted mostly of professors and other faculty from various institutions, they are all in need of different types of software, and open source is their answer, but only through work with the community.

Comparison

Both talks were very different in the way they were presented, I really liked the Communities Perspective, the panel was different, and very interactive. While the presentation by Brendan was very informative and energetic, and impulsively got me interested in all of the design tools talked about. Not only did all of the presenters in these two talks actively follow, contribute and promote the open source community, but I also got that feeling from pretty much all of the presentation which I attended. The community panel really opened my eyes on how large open source is becoming, especially when large corporations like IBM, who I previously thought only focused on making a profit, at active participants in the community. It also showed me how much the community wants help, and it is not as time consuming, or hard to get involved. Brendan showed me some tools which I am familiar with, but even more which I have not even heard of. It also surprised me to see that open source tools are now being used in big budget movies, it really shows how powerful these open source tools are becoming, and that there is a large market for them.

Conclusion

I am fairly new in the open source community, I have used various applications, but I must admit that I am very overwhelmed when it comes to finding a program which I need to use, there are just so many! Some are good, some are bad, and most I have no idea how to use, which is one of the reasons why I found it so hard to really get into using open source products. My picture of open source has definitely changed after attending FSOSS, I have realized that the open source community is a powerful resource, and that when I am faced with a problem I can always turn to the community for help. There are many powerful applications in the open source world, and while getting help from the documentation may be close to impossible, the community can offer help and interaction in solving my problems. The presentations also made me realize that open source is no longer something only used by super computer programmers, or hardcore computer nerds, it is being used by everyone, and everyone can get involved. FSOSS was an incredible experience, and I will definitely be attending next year.