1
edit
Changes
m
=ignore below===Summaries It was great to hear from many of two talks=====What was each talk about======What was the speaker's main point======What was the speaker's background presenters that my views of Open Source and point of view=====Analysis of each speaker's views on ''open source'Free software aren't unique to me. He/she may This means that I am not mention it explicitlytotally insane. You must listen This conference has solidified in my mind that Open Source and try Free software represent more than the letter of the licenses which they use. For a Free or Open Source project to be successful, it has to understand based take on what they are saying, the full philosophy of the Open and perhaps not sayingFree approach.====Comparison It has to develop and maintain a community of developers, testers, documentation writers and graphic designers to ensure that there is enough muscle to do the points made by the presenters=====What can you say about work. It has to be an open source and classless community where all contributors are valued on their merits instead of their employer. Finally it has to give back in a useful manner to the light of people who have built the points they made======Do infrastructure that make the speakers have similar views of open source or do they disagree======How so=====Conclusion about your views on ''open source''====Does the picture of open source you've seen presented in these talks challenge or confirm your own views about what open source is and how it functions==project possible.
no edit summary
==Comparison==
I feel that both speakers value open source ideals, however, I feel that David is more interested in the letter of the license than the spirit. This is to be expected as he is legal counsel to a software alliance. Paul seemed to think of the copyright laws as an enabler of free and open development. I learned quite a bit about copyright, especially the differences between US copyright law and Canadian law. It was also really interesting to learn how much is allowed under the current copyright law in Canada. Both presenters stressed how important free and open development is to software, but looked at it from different viewpoints. The similarities are demonstrated in the example of proprietary drivers. David's organisation is against blocking reverse engineering as it limits competition and Paul's takes advantage of the opportunity by performing the reverse engineering.
==Conclusions==
I learned a lot from both presenters and found both presentations to be very interesting. I believe that my views on Open Source and Free software are very similar to both presenters. Where I feel I learned the most is in the history and context. Through David I learned a lot about how Open Source and Free software works in copyright and patent law while I learned a lot of the history of community relations between Fedora and Red hat from Paul. I used Red Hat Linux from version 5.2 to version 9. I found that these operating systems were overly complex and noticed that there was a lot of work to be done on them. After the Fedora Core was started, I found that my needs weren't being met as well as they could be. It was at this point when I switched to using the Ubuntu distribution. At this point I didn't understand why this distribution was meeting my needs. I later figured out that it is solely because Ubuntu is developed in a community. This allows people who care about a specific area of the project to work on what they want. This makes sure that there is enough labour to produce the end result as well as ensuring that motivated people are working on the system. The next realisation I came to regarding Open Source and Free software was that some projects make tremendous use of other peoples work and provide their enhancements but do it in a way that it is of little help to the originators. This leads to situations where software distributors have so many bits of divergent code that aren't ever assimilated into their upstream project's code that the distribution becomes a barnacle. This is a situation where the project makes so many advancements that you can't forget about them, but they aren't really helping because they are causing so much turbulence to adopt in the upstream project to use. This is not to say that these distributors have their place, only that they need to re-evaluate their goals.
