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= Michael MullinGreedy Student's Report on FSOSS = DRAFT
== The Important Things we need to Remember ==
Solutions build on Solutions.
Wants + Purchasing Power = Demand.
Why is my bias important? Because I am writing this paper, and you are reading it. If you cannot understand where I have been, then you will not understand where I am going with my logic and reasoning.
Miguel is a Physicist with Canada's Federal Government; he talked about the [http://documentation.wikia.com/wiki/METRo METRo] project. Miguel developed a Road Temperature Modeling program for the Federal Government, and open sourced the program after the fourth iteration.
Though Miguel talked about the history of the software he works on, the main point I took from his talk was the position of the Federal Government on software usage. Miguel explained that the Federal Government takes a 'balanced approach' to the software it uses. Which I understand as "we use what is the most practical for us." (I feel skeptical of that because of [http://cdneducation.blogspot.com/2007/10/so-is-microsoft-dictating-what-is-used.html education scandlesscandals]). Though I feel skeptical of the government about all things most of the time, METRo is a proof that there is a push towards the open source model in our Canadian Politics.
Miguel has received contributions from about 4 or 5 people after releasing METRo as open source. METRo still has a very small community.
Ross is a spokesman for Nortel and spoke about [http://www.xen.org/ XEN] Virtualization. Ross presented to me the idea that virtualization can save business a LARGE amount of money, by allowing a company to harvest all the CPU cycles they possibly can.
'''warning, this little use case is my position, and not necessarily Ross' this is how I understood things...'''
eg. Company XYZ has 100 client machines running for employees during the daytime, and a powerful server running massive amounts of batch processing to run during the evening. Along side of these two main tasks, are other services such as intranet web hosting, company VoIP management, etc, all on dedicated machines
Virtualization can give you the dedicated Operating System needed AND it can provide one piece of software to control all CPU cycle time. One virtualization core can spawn off guest machines as needed for employees during the daytime, re-harvesting their cycles during the evening for another guest machine spawned to run batch during the evening. Separate virtual machines can be spawned for the intranet and other services as needed.
'''end of example'''
XEN is a very large project, and hundreds of developers have contributed to various internal projects contained within its boundaries. Ross explained how Novell was working hand in hand with Microsoft to provide fully supported XEN Linux->Windows solutions.
== Conclusion ==
=== Why does getting paid matter? ===
''Michael, your just a greedy bastard! Why all the attention towards money, can you not understand the potential for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Fordism_and_society utopian] life through Open Source?''
Perhaps; Life sitting in a rented basement writing free code and barely paying the bills isn't a terrible prospect to me, I could really ''digg'' that life. But as I get older I realize people cannot build a future doing that. People that attend Open Source Symposiums are not impoverished, they can afford plane tickets; the mozilla guys are doing well for themselves; my professors have families they are able support. Is it wrong of me to want the same standard of living as they?
The key to life is getting paid to do something you love, and thats what I am trying to look for. I really love programming, when I have to time to sit down and dedicate 6 hours to the mozilla code base trying to solve my project, I am having a great f'in time. Other open source projects would no doubt derive the same pleasure in me, and in this wiki-report I have discussed two other open sourced projects which seam very interesting to me.
What I am left with as I leave the FSOSS is the belief that employment in the world of open source is possible. On projects like METRo undiscovered fountains of wealthy lay hidden, waiting for a lucky prospector to come along and strike gold (or perhaps [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrite pyrite]). With projects like XEN, large mining facilities have already been established, and those with the pick and shovel of knowledge can come assist the extraction process. Companies already understand the powers of open source (Microsoft & Novell understand the wealth possibilities of backing the XEN project). As more contributions are made to METRo governments are seeing how open sourcing in house software can help them as well. Governments and business both require experts to continue the work of open source projects, and if I am industrious enough and become and expert, I too can work on open source.