User talk:Tai Nguyen
FSOSS 14
About The Talks:
Chris Aniszczyk is an engineer who currently works for Twitter. He is an advocate for open source and is involved in various open source projects and communities. Chris is the head of Twitter’s open source program and is in charge of their open source efforts. He has been a part of Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors and Java Community Process Executive Committee. He has also been involved with leading and hacking on many eclipse.org and Linux related projects.
Chris alludes to a philosophical statement, “don’t reinvent the wheel”. What he means by this statement is that if you are working on a project or a problem, before trying to solve it on your own, search for a working solution, because most likely someone else has already implement a solution that you can use. Chris suggests the notion that most projects are eventually going to depend on other open source projects, so it’s a good idea to not privatize your code, especially if you’re working on a big project, since using third party dependency is inevitable as it will make your life so much easier.
Chris also notes that for organizations, open source is great for rapid project development because you have tons of helping hands to work for you. He keys in on the fact that when as a business that is managing an open source project, it’s good to be transparent by publically releasing all the necessary information and tools to the community if you want them to aid in your development. However, he keys in the fact that a business should never release publically their “secret ingredient”, this basically means a business shouldn’t release their competitive model that makes them competitive against other market competitors. In addition, people should use open source licenses like MIT or BSD to increase participation and adoption of their code. And also he suggests to default to GitHub, which will help encourage more external development and help popularize your project.
Cloud Computing Infrastructure: Introduction with OpenStack
Kent Poots is a professor in the Engineering Departments at Seneca College and Centennial College in Toronto. In addition, he has his PhD in computer science and engineering from York University, specializing in systems infrastructure implementation. He has worked for prominent companies, including IBM, HP, Oracle and Microsoft.
Kent is involved in an open source project known as OpenStack, which is a free and open-source framework for control management of cloud computing systems. In other words, it is a cloud operating system that controls large pool of computer processing resources, storage, and networking resources. Administrators can easily manage their entire cloud infrastructure or servers with a dashboard. People who use OpenStack, tend to use it to distribute their applications that run on cloud servers. It has the ability to virtualize their application to users via a web interface.
Kent explains how the cloud has become an integral part of our virtual world; it is evident in the service we use such as an online storage provider or the Google application like Google Docs. Kent claims that cloud computing has increase development in SaaS (software as a service). Users do not require to run the application on their computers, which means they do not need to depend on computer power to handle power intensive applications. It also, gives user easy accessibility; all they need is a device with internet application. Kent also goes into PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service).
Conclusion and Reflection
Overall, everyone’s presentation was informative in regards to open source as a whole. At first, I was apprehensive about getting involved with open source, because I was unclear about how everything was manage in order to develop an entire software with people distributed all over the world. I had questions like, how did people collaborate or how did the contributors maintain code from written by different people. However, after their presentation, I have learned many benefits that the open source community provides.
