I attended FSOSS 2011 on Saturday, October 29 and saw two presentations, the first one being a presentation on running a build farm using ARM processors running the Fedora operating system presented by Seneca students Jordan Cwang, Anthony Boccia, and Jon Chiappetta who themselves are currently running Seneca’s own ARM based server farm. Their presentation would focus on the how to of setting up your own ARM based server farm using open source software. The second presentation I saw was Multilingual Sites and Translation Management in Drupal which was presented by Anas Tawileh, director of a Toronto based company called Systematics Consulting that provides consulting on open source and information security consulting. His presentation covered methods on creating sites that support multiple languages in Drupal, an open source content management system.

This presentation was made by Jordan Cwang, Anthony Boccia, and Jon Chiappetta who are themselves Seneca students. Unfortunately that and the fact that they are currently running an ARM based server farm in Seneca as part of an open source research project is all that I know of them.

I found this presentation to be fairly interesting and though I got lost on some of the finer technical details of it I pretty much understood the system architecture that they were proposing. All of the work of managing the content, managing the builds themselves and providing the environment would all be free open source software. Granted, I most likely will not be doing anything like this anytime soon. As cheap as ARM hardware probably is I definitely don’t see setting up something like this from scratch costing anything less than to a few hundred a couple of thousand dollars, not to mention the sheer technical know how required to setting this up is currently way beyond my level of understanding. Still something like this would be invaluable to small companies and organizations or even to a small group of students and academics or really anyone hoping to get a chance to work with their own server farm but need a cost effective means of doing so.

The next presentation I saw dealt with translation management of multilingual websites in Drupal by Anas Tawileh and was a bit of an eye opener. I know well enough that there are quite a bit of non-English websites out there and that not everyone in the world knows English, what was surprising was the ratio between people on the internet who don’t speak English at all between the people who can speak it (only 1 out of 6 internet users world wide can read, write and/or speak English). This obviously means that quite a bit of websites out there would be written in their owner’s native language and not in English and would cater to the speakers of that language which in turn means that the language barriers that exist in the real world also exist in the internet. What the Drupal translation management hopes to do is to tear down this barrier in the internet by providing a quick, easy and cost effective means of translating websites.

My impression of Anas’ view of open source is that it can be used to develop the tools necessary to make the internet truly global and by truly global I don’t just mean that everyone has access to it but has access to the content and information from people’s websites from around the world. The language gap is one of the elements that still restrict people’s access to information in the web, by creating a tool that can quickly, cheaply and accurately translate the websites of people around the world, that barrier can be greatly weakened if not removed altogether.

The presentations ended up getting too overly technical at some points however and as a result their messages ended up going over my head, though in the case of the Popcorn presentation, the technical components were quite welcome as it gave me additional insight into how to implement the slideshow player.

As to how my impressions of open source has changed after going to FSOSS it’s hard to say, I know that there is quite a bit of open source projects out there but I’ve often held the impression that the vast majority of those projects consisted of small scale stand alone projects that people implemented in their free time either as an academic exercise or just for the sheer fun of coding an application; with only a small minority of large complex projects out there. FSOSS was an eye opener in that I realize that there are far more large complex projects out there and that these projects are highly ambitious in what they hope to accomplish. Anas’ Drupal translator itself would lift a great deal of the restrictions on what content one can view on the internet by providing a means to read and understand sites written in languages that the reader is unfamiliar with, while Jordan, Anthony and Jon’s presentation on ARM based server farms provides the know how that would enable just about anyone to setup their own server farm without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on both the actual hardware and on maintaining it.

I have to admit, I did end up attending the FSOSS event somewhat begrudgingly. I had gone into study week with far more than enough work to keep me occupied and the prospect of having to spend the next few hours attending an event rather than finishing up my work or more preferably catching up on some much needed sleep wasn’t something that I wasn’t to crazy with. In retrospect though I am glad that I went, that event opened up a new level of understanding of what kinds of open source projects are out there that I can, hopefully someday, participate in once I get a bit more time on my hands. Here’s looking forward to FSOSS 2012, hopefully I won’t be so swamped with work that I can participate on all three days.