Seneca FSOSS 2014 Report
I had attended FSOSS presentation in Seneca last Friday. The Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) is a yearly event at Seneca College focused on free and open source software. There are 30 presentation about open source during two days. Each speaker come from different open source project. Such as, CHad Pilkey and Fred Dixon present "Evolving BigBlueButton to support WebRTC, HTML5, and mobile clients", Bob and Chirs Aniszczyk is Header engineering manager of Open Source at Twitter. I had attended five presents and I would talk about two of them which is I think most interest for me.
Keynote Presentation: Twitter
Chris Aniszczyk is an engineer by trade with a passion for open source and building communities. At Twitter, he created their open source program and leads their open source efforts. For many years he served on the Eclipse Foundation's Board of Directors representing the committer community and the Java Community Process Executive Committee. In a previous life, he bootstrapped a consulting company, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many eclipse.org and Linux related projects. At the presentation, he shared the story about twitter to us.
What is Twitter? it is "Instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaning full to them ". He has been leading Twitter's open source more than 3 years. It's include the creation of open source programs, managing inbound and outbound licensing of open source software, and pushing for the evolution of Twitter’s open source strategy. He showed the Twitter runs on open source such as Linux, jQuery, MySQL, redis and others. However, He think when you open source code, there's a chance that someone on the inside or outside will let you know it's been done in some way already. Also he mention about Define Secret Sauce for open source and others as below:
Define Secret Sauce
- Don't Open source anything that represents a core business value. Define your secret sauce so there's a shared understanding that can guide company decisions. Embed this secret sauce within your culture and company
Embrace open source
- best of breed solution are open these days
- learn from your peers code and university research don't only consume
- give back to enrich ecosystem
Incremental change always wins
- increase chance of success by making small changes
- small changes add up with minimized risk
- loosely coupled micro service work
"Data Center as a computer" is future direction of infrastructure
In the end he said Establish metrics and measure yourself against them. Otherwise, how can you know what's going on and how can you improve?. Open compliance is important. Establish a efficient open compliance process that balances speed, rish and efficiency. Use or build tools to help make it easy and transparent.
Bootstrap
Nelson Ko is the Chief Technology Officer at Synergiq Solutions Inc., created when the company he originally founded in 2006, Citadel Rock Online Communities Inc., merged with Gilbert+Davis Communications. He is a project admin of the Tiki open source software community, and in 2007-08 led the implementation of Tiki for Firefox Support at Mozilla, a pioneer in open source customer support. He talked about Bootstrap and it is open source. Bootstrap is the most popular open source CSS framework today. Millions of web sites and applications use it to provide a superior mobile and web experience to their users.
So What is Bootstrap? The Bootstrap is:
- developed at Twitter and open sourced
- a set of tools for creating websites and web applications
- a CSS framework
- responsive web design
- mobile-first philosophy
Nelson show us Bootstrap in Tiki. Tiki is "the Free and Open Source Web Application with the most built-in features. So whatever feature you can imagine running in your browser window, chances are Tiki does it". Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is a web content management system that has thousands of built-in features and is likely the most comprehensive integrated system that exists today.
He spoken about Bootstrap in Tiki:
- Needed to upgrade to HTML5
- Unlike say Wordpress. Tiki is more of an "application platform" than a "website platform". So Boorstrap is in fact an even better fit
- Needed to be mobile friendly
- Need to adopt respinsive web design
Nelson also mention advantage of Bootstrap:
Time saver common language
- between designers and developers
- between the Photoshop person and the CSS person
- more standard approach when developing new feature
Each speaker was presentation their own experience about open source. They main point of the open source is free to run it, to study and change it. Most speaker have same opinion about open source in different way as enhance complete project efficiency, build it by people around world and also have many other advantage. As I Chris Aniszczyk said "The right thing to do. These days, it's very difficult to build anything without benefiting from open source code in some fashion. Find ways to pay it forward as a 'rising tide lifts all boats' in the industry". I agree what they said. Open source is awesome. They sharing idea with others, many developer work on a project together around world, reduce duplication and improve it.
I know more about open source after they are shared their own opinions and experience about open source to us. It is very helpful in open source. what is open source? It's developed through free sharing and the transparent exchange of ideas. However, There are many advantage of open source. First, the quality of the project. The project is created by many developers and enhance the project quality. Secondly, it is freedom. Users can control to make their own decisions for software. And also they can do whatever they want in software. Finally, The cost of the open source software. It is very good choice for business because you can get better quality at a fraction of the price or maybe free.
In the end, I am pretty grateful to them for sharing their experience in open source. I get better understanding about it than before. I think I will enjoy in open source and it will improve me. Also, connect with other people from different country. Let's Open Source.