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This document recapitulates and examines a portion of the Free Software and Open Source Symposium, FSOSS. There will be a brief introduction of FSOSS followed by a list of topics I have attended. The main focus then centers on two of the presentations, as it will include a detailed summary of key points as well as an analysis of them. Furthermore, there will be a compare and contrast of the two presentations with some of the thoughts I’ve come across tothat crosses my mind. 

The Free Software and Open Source Symposium, FSOSS event aimed at bringing together people from across the world to discuss common open source Open Source concerns, learn new open source Open Source technologies and to forecast up coming upcoming focuses in the open source Open Source community. The symposium includes short tutorials and demonstrations along with frank discussions and exchange of ideas presented by Professors, Developers, Graduates all around the world. Fortunately, I learned about the event from the course DPS909, and have an opportunity to be present at such a big event.<br/><br/>Here’s the 6 presentations that I went to:* 9:00 – 10:00 Creating an Animated Twitter Widget for your Website with Processing.js by Alistair MacDondald* 10:00 – 11:00 Ranking the Bugs: Predicting Which Bugs Will Get Fixed by Diederik van Liere* 11:00 – 12:00 A View from the Gallery: a tour of the JVM Alternative Languages by Newman Hunter* 13:00 – 14:00 Tiki Profiles - An App Store Approach to Enabling Collaboration using the TikiWiki Platform by Nelson Ko and Pascal St-Jean* 14:00 – 15:00 Open Source for fun and profit: making a career out of FOSS by Khalid Baheyeldin* 15:00 – 16:00 3D in the browser... more than just Doom by Catherine Leung 

Pascal St-Jean is a Directory, Director of Business Development with Citadel Rock Online Communities. He was the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of PicSphere Technologies. His He has a great passion in engineering in which his goal is to turn them engineer and business strategy into successful ventures. He is an active member of the TikiWiki community with major interest in creating, growing and promoting Tiki Profiles. He has over 6 years of technology consulting and IT management experiencesexperience. He His current interests are Open Source business models and Social Media Marketing.<br/><br/>TikiWiki is a content management systemContent Management System (CMS). It is a powerful web based application created by developers from the CMS and Groupware project. It is a wiki software engine. It allows user to build and maintain web applications, sites, portals, knowledge base bases such as wikiwikis, groupware, CMS, ForumForums, BlogBlogs, and many others. There are five partners in across Canada using TikiWiki. It is free source software which is using PHP, Smarty, ADOdb, Zend Framework and JQuery. It offers a large number of “out"out-of-the-box” box" features. It is highly configurable and all features are administered via a web-based interface. It also supports up to 35+ languages.<br/><br/>TikiWiki has been developed since 2002 with over 170 developers. They actively develop on the source code and keep TikiWiki up to date with the new technologies to suit a large amount number of users. For example, The help function (shortcut – F1 on keyboard) in Mozilla, Firefox is powered by TikiWiki. The largest usage is approximately 16 million visitors per month.<br/><br/>Since TikiWiki use uses large amount amounts of new technologies and allow allows users to build different web applications, forums, blog, and many more, the problem with that is it adds complexity. It is more suitable for power userusers. It is harder for adoption because the learning curve is steep. To solve this kind of concern in order to expand the community to average user basedusers, TikiWiki used an end-to-end one click configuration system called Tiki Profile is created using YAML profiletechnology. YAML is a human readable serialization, which similar to the idea is taken from of XML. It provides end to end configuration to TikiWikiEverything including look and feel, features and sample data can be configured into the system using Tiki Profiles. The community can create a profile for corporate intranet and personal blogs. The best thing about TikiWiki is there is a Profile Repository for users to participate in creating profiles, or just simply acquire a profile can be added separately, for easy to be shared and distributed openlysetup.

Khalid Baheyeldin is the co-founder and managing partner with 2bit2bits.com. He provides drupal Drupal services to clients and is one of the most active developers for Drupal. The Drupal project is an Open Source Content Management System (CMS). His contributions to drupal Drupal project involves site involve offline features, watchdog hooks, implement an automatic whitelist for path alias and others. He provides Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP consulting. He mostly focus on the Drupal web sites includes customization, development, performance tuning and optimization.<br/><br/>Khalid focuses more on the benefits that an Open Source software/community brings. The biggest difference between corporation Closed Source and Open source Source is who the winners are. In order for a Closed Source corporationto be successful, it must try to gain as much market share as possible in the developers work will not be noticed or appreciatedexpense of the competitor's. The sales team will package and present the product This model suggests monopolism, which corporations are more focused into providing better results with respect to what the clientscompetitors have. From This results in less creativity in the client sidesproducts, they will and this type of market is not considered to be familiar with healthy. This model also leads to high barrier for developers to enter the sales or marketing peoplemarket since corporations always look for efficiency that their employees provide. Besides, developers are paid to deliver their work, may be the owner corporation claims the development of the company but they will their work. They are often not notice who developed the code for the productnoticed or appreciated, which might lower their morality. There Moreover, there is also a common issue in most corporations paid jobs - the office politics and hierarchy structure. The developer’s creative ideas often need It happens a lot that colleagues will do something harmful to others in order to be approved by management after management levelmove up the hierarchy. It Therefore, Closed Source business model is a very destructive and antagonist relationshipaffiliation, and can be summarized as a win-lose-lose situation to the corporation, the market, and the developers themselves.<br/><br/>Open Source on the other hand is a win-win-win situation. It reduced the The capital and ongoing costscost can be minimal as there are typically fewer employees needed to organize an Open Source community than to operate a Closed Source corporation. It always contains many difference different choices for maintenance. For example, no matter is inhouseit can be in house, consulting companies, freelancers or the community. There Since Open Source means everyone in the world is no office politicsfree to get involved to develop the software, developers are free it can draw a high number of programmers. This helps to find bugs easier and respond to express their ideasthem quicker. There is no need for special permissionAlso, feethe features of the products will be focusing on what the market wants instead of how Closed Source strategy works. As a result, or special licenses in customization. It a better product is easier available to get notice in which the market. Since the barrier of entry is low , programmers benefit from having experiences with full functioning products where otherwise need to be employed by large corporations in order to get access to the source codes. There are no office politics where nobody would want anybody to fail in doing his/her work. Again, in terms of the corporation's, the market's, and users are easily marketing outthe developers' point of view, Open Source is a win-win-win situation rather than Close Source's win-lose-lose situation.<br/><br/>There are a few types of license typesfor Open Source software. BSD variants, users can do whatever they want. It included , including closing it off, for example, NetBSD for Apple OS/X. GPL, general public license, ; it is the most popular and well-known example of strong copyleft license. GPL grants users the rights of free software definitions and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved. Mozilla is a weak copyleft, which refers to those license are not all derived works inherit the copyleft license. It is generally used for the creation of software libraries which allow other software to link to that library and redistributed without legal requirement for the work.<br/><br/>The Some of the business models for the Open Source are:*Sell the hardware that uses software, there are many embedded device use Linux. For example, google androidGoogle Android, palm premobilePalm Premobile, Nokia n900. Linux is an Open Source product, but when the business embedded Linux in their product, they can make a profit with lower the operating cost.

In 2bits.com, Inc specialized 's case, they specialize in custom development for web sites, especially based on the Drupal Content Management System and framework. It used PHP and MySQL or PostgreSQL. Drupal as a project is ever evolving and improving. Drupal as a community is the most important asset of Drupal. It collectively are is the ones who use, support, promote and improve the project.Three types of symbolizes best represent the Open Source. The first one, mutualism is a biological interaction between two organisms where each individual is getting benefit on either side. Commensalism is the organisms that living along the side where one organism befefits but the other is unaffected. Parasitism is the relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite benefits at the expense of the host.<br/><br/>Drupal has seven principles:*Modular and extensible *Quality coding*Standards-based*Low resource demands*Open source*Ease of use*Collaboration

==Tiki Profiles – - An App Store Approach to Enabling Collaboration using the TikiWiki Platform==Open source refers The approach of using Tiki profile is the most interesting feature. There are multiples ways to configuring the settings of a software distribution modelprogram. Developers designusually will use GUI to configure, develop and distribute but the disadvantage of using GUI is involving repetitive task to perform similar functions for multiple program. For example, when people want to setup five computer using Windows, they need to repeatedly click on the same settings five times in order to configure. With the software Tiki profile, user only requires few simple clicks to publicconfigure the same settings for multiple programs. St Jean is an active member The reason why the two speakers are willing to support the concept of the TikiWiki community. is because TikiWiki is an not only for the Open Source program with over 170 developers. TikiWiki is a platform where developers are constantly updating to get benefit from the Tiki's source code for improvement and new features. As more features and technologies are added into it, the more complex it will get. As it become more complex, but the tentative audience will be switch concept extends to power user end users as oppose to average user basedwell. The use of YAML developers definitely can share the code, but the end users can also share their Tiki profile to provide end to end configuration for TikiWiki has helped them expand the community to include average user. TikiWiki used another open source program They can participate to share and help improve each others in the communityProfile Repository. It is an example of how one open source program Although the speakers mainly focus on the product itself, I can simply integrated and use onto another open source program. There is no complex legal issue they have sense that their passion to pass out the Open Source concept to deal with. The sharing of code has increase efficiencythe public.

Baheyeldin talks on the drupal project. It is an open source project but they can still be able to make profit out of it. Although open source is free code or software has mentioned many benefits for public, but there are different ways to make a profit out of itparticipating in Open Source community. Hardware The most interesting concept that uses open source program caught my attention is the way people can lower the operating cost and in result easier to make earn a revenueliving from Open Source community. One of the key elements between corporation and open source few barriers for entering Open Source community is freedomthat people do not get the return for what they have contributed immediately. Open source developers can free flow their ideas People earn reputation and make any changes they like to improve the program. But experiences in a corporation, there are many steps before a change to a program to be made. Every idea has to trademark or get a copyright before the program can be release. It an easier way than Closed Source which is slowing down the efficiency. In the open source world, developers are very beneficial for free to throw out code and ideaslancer or consultant. It is easier to share and combine with different ideas. Anyone They can contribute a small portion of the program, others can provide bug fixes, documentation use these reputation and many others. In the open source platform, everyone is in a win-win situationexperience as their assets when looking for jobs.=Comparison=Both St Jean and Baheyeldin There are senior many developers in the Open source platform with market, not many years of them have Open Source experience. The common view on For example, DPS909 is one of the very few Open source is easy to share and distributeSource development courses offered by Ontario institutions. TikiWiki These experiences and durpal project are fully featured open source web applications. They used common web-base and database language such as PHP and MySQL. Both platforms do not contain large operating cost in reputation become very valuable for program developers which they are easier to obtain a profit.<br/><br/>Both projects are content management system, but TikiWiki is more focused on built-in features. It allows users to be easily using the product with less customization to the source code. Durpual allows users to add different features via modules, but on the other hand, it allows user to add the model they needmake them unique.

The FSOSS gathered people around the world to share and discuss different things in the open source Open Source community. Each speaker has their own thoughts and opinion on the Open Source platform. But they all are aiming toward the same destination.<br/><br/>The most xxx caught my attention Open Source is when Baheyeldin mentioned although the developer won’t get return instantly but they can build up their reputation fun and contribute on the programprofitable. These groups of developers is xxx good for the community and gain more audience to the open source platform.<br/><br/>According to xxxThe BBC report, the statistics has shown of the 16 to 50 years old surveyed, those who download illegally (not willing to buy products prior to fully utilizing them) spend more than $126 average on music per year. On the other hand, those that who don't do any file-sharing activities only spend $72 average. The money the pirates spend is far more than the normal shoppers who purchase copyrighted itemsonly use what they have purchased. It is because they people are more willing to purchase something they have good experienced withrather than to purchase something only with good reputation. Similarly to open source Open Source platform, although we are not charge to download the open source Open Source software but as Baheyeldin had mentioned earlier, we can use other ways to make profit with the product that use open source Open Source software.

Tikiwiki*[http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php TikiWiki]Durpal*[http://drupal.org/ Durpal]2bit*[http://2bits.com/ 2bits.com]*[http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2009/ FSOSS]*[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8337887.stm BBC report]