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→Speaker and Speaker’s Views on Open Source
Code Reading and Review” is presented by Benjamin Smedberg from Mozilla Cooperation. He has been involved in the open source community for a long time and I feel that he understand the open source community very well. He made a lot of critical suggestion and recommendation to us on how to create, control, lead, use, and work in the open source community. I find his suggestion to be very useful and productive.
Open Commercial Development” is presented by Lawrence Mandel and Jeffrey Liu from IBM Canada. They seem to be new to open source as during the presentation, I feel that they are trying to understand what open source is as well. For many time, they have mentioned the definition of open source is different from people to people and I often got confused during their presentation because they often mention how open commercial and different from open source while what they explained as open commercial is identical to the agile development technique. Maybe I got it completely wrong, they are just trying to improve the quality of the program by creating a new development model based on open source but their explanation on open commercial development is as if they are trying to take advantage of open source while renaming agile development technique into something that as already exist and make it their own. Sometime they made me feel that they are just trying to convert open source into something that are more profitable. That is understandable in a business prospective, but in a way it completely destroys the idea of “free software” and “open source”.
= My View of Open Source=
My definition of open source basically comes from the dictionary. “Open source refers to any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit.” Source code is made available publicly online. Everyone can use it, everyone can change it or ignore it. They are free to comments. You can say anything you want. It is a completely free environment to develop software with minimizes constraint as long as you are not making a profit out of it and as long as it is made free to everyone. We share code, we share idea and we help each other on the way. It is an ideal place for everyone to work together and made high quality software.
From the FSOSS, I learnt that my definition is somewhat similar to most of the people yet there are different. Open source grants programmer a place to share idea while there are a lot of legal issue attach to it. It is a place where everyone works together while there are often “troll” destroys in the community. Control and leadership are very important in the community. People often resist to changes and it is difficult to identify the different between a “troll” and a “great idea”.
=Conclusion=
The symposium is a great way to learn about the newest idea in open source. It is a great way to know about new idea, it is a great way to meet new people, it is a great way to know open source better. I have become a better programmer by attending to the talks. I am amazed how people are willing to share their precious knowledge which made them so successful. I learnt to read code better, create better user interface, manage a high traffic website, about the different point of view in open source, about the open source community and how to work with them. Those are knowledge that I cannot learn from anywhere else. Moreover, I got the chance to see and meet with many amazing people from Mozilla, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, SourceForge and more. I am definitely coming back to the FSOSS next year.
