Changes

FSOSS for me has been a real unique experience. For one, I decided to volunteer for the event since it would save a lowly student, such as me, money. But it would also give me a unique and different view of the entire process that I knew I could never get again.

Being a volunteer was a fulfilling experience. I chose to work the Friday morning registration desk. It was not a particularly friendly time at seven in the morning but was one of the last options that I had really. After arriving I was shortly acquainted by Cathy my former Algorithms teacher and Rose who work at the computer studies office. They were two of the main organizers of FSOSS this year.

Working the registration desk on Friday was particularly calm since most of the attendees had already checked in the day before. None the less there were still a few who came in and I was actually required to do some work at the relatively easy job.

In fact, out of four volunteers I was the only one that showed up that morning. This made me feel happy that I had not slept in or no one would have shown up. Overall, I had a great time as a volunteer and would encourage other to do it. The only downfall was that I missed a few talks during the morning.

One of the many interesting talks that I attended was by Dean Jansen who is the Outreach Director for the Participatory Culture Foundation. He talked about Miro which is an open source program that is designed to unite all video playing applications and websites under one banner that should become an open standard that others could follow.

Miro is capable of aggregating RSS feeds and actually has a built in bit torrent client that is used to download new shows that become available through RSS. It also features a media library, and if you are a content provider, web space to host your files.

The open source community is used as a spring board that will allow Miro to set better standards. Open source has allowed Miro to avoid costly licensing from companies for using their video formats and allows them to maintain their own message which is untarnished by other companies or alliances to companies.

Video standards and recording might not be my cup of tea, but looking over Miro still shows me that they take their mission statement very seriously. I’d definitely say they’re growing fast.

This session lead by Marcel Gagné who is a University professor, Author, and Columnist for Linux Journal showed the room how to make the best of any Linux distribution with the latest open source software. His upbeat humor and personality worked well with the mood of the room. He showed everyone new programs coming out that will make using Linux just as user friendly as any version of Windows.

He showed the room many tips on customizing the desktop that included the use of widget (just like vista ships with), changing your start bar to suit your needs, and new special effects programs like compiz and beryl.

Marcel was a great speaker that seemed to live and breathe open source Linux. He has show everyone in that room how to take advantage of things that he had been taking advantage of for a long time in an easy way.

Marcel seems to have adapted open source to a lifestyle. Everything he did involved the use of open source to empower him to finish his tasks. It was refreshing to see someone who took open source to the extreme and survived to tell the tail. Better yet, he was telling us how to do it too. Open source has never had a very good history of reliability but Marcel was fighting this point, despite having the session crash on him a couple of times.

Everyone at FSOSS seemed to have taken open source to the next level. It seems that all large corporations were using open source to their advantage to turn a profit selling services. While other smaller companies and organizations were relying on open source communities to push their product out the door.

Open source seems to have many different small variations that are used from group to group, but the overall core of open source remains the same. It is centered on some kind of community that has a say in what happens next. Depending on the project the community will have more sway in deciding factors but ultimately there would be no software without a community.