As I had mentioned last week, I went to the Ohio LinuxFest. I was generously rewarded not only by the presentations, but also by the luminary class event as a whole. Friday’s keynote speaker was none other than Jon Hall. Jon spoke about how Linux is used around the world. Two key things I loved about this talk was how Jon Described his interaction with Linus Torvalds and how Jon was able to get Linus a DEC Alpha so that Linus could port Linux to that platform.

As well, I greatly appreciated the tale of how Jon had left a Linux CD behind at the University of the Pacific on Fiji. On his next visit there, Linux ruled the installed environment. There was of course more, but suffice it to say, it was an engaging talk.

On Saturday, Dr. Kirk Marshall McKusick gave a talk on how to manage a project. He used the BSD / FreeBSD projects as the basis for this talk. One of the keys to running a successful project, Dr. McKusick suggests, is getting rid of the deadwood. In the case of the BSD project, he did this by ensuring that there was a core team that changes on a regular basis; members to the core team, who can grant commit privileges and are elected by the committers. It seems an excellent model for project organization.

I saw other presentations that I valued. Of note was the presentation given by Emma Marshall from System 76 about how she works with a team to help get Ubuntu into classrooms. I also learned a little about how Juju is used to help deploy in a server environment by Jorge Castro. I was interviewed by the Sunday Morning Linux Review crew. I show up at about the 58 minute mark.

If you’ve never been to OLF, I recommend you put it on your conference calendar for next year and that you take a friend.

Daniel Hinojosa, SourceForge Community Manager

d.

Hi folks,

I’ll be at Ohio LinuxFest this weekend. I’m looking forward to what I hear is an excellent conference as well as attending the sessions and meeting many of you. If you see me walking by, stop me and introduce yourself!

d.

While this tool is an excellent way for a team to pick a place to go to lunch, this module could easily be used for “ranked choice” voting like what Alameda County in California uses.

To learn more about this Perl module, check out the PrefVote.org page.

Daniel Hinojosa.

Cheers!

d.

We have asked Pierre Queinnec, President of the 2013 Open World Forum, to tell us more about this edition.

The baseline for this edition is “Make it Happen!” and summarizes the focus on technological and industrial successes built on Free Software and Open Source. If you want to know how to build a successful free and open source strategy, and network with the people that make it happen on a global scale, then register now! OWF is a non-profit event and we expect this year 3000 attendees in Paris, France.

Last year we chaired the Open Forges Summit track. We look forward to going there again to update the audience about our advancement on Apache Allura development – the technology behind the SourceForge developer platform – and how that is helping EU-funded projects to succeed. For an example check out the opensourceprojects beta site powered by Allura.

We’re giving away SourceForge mugs, so if you’re here at PyCon come by today to get one!

If you’re not at PyCon, you can still watch all the talks streaming live at http://timvideos.us/ today and tomorrow (Mar 16 & 17, PST daytime hours).  Slides are also being posted at https://speakerdeck.com/pyconslides  Learn something new about Python today!

As Track Chair of the Open Forges Summit 2012 I’ve been in the position to invite few international speakers to bring their opinions and views, and we actually put together an amazing gathering of people sharing the same passion, read below to know more about it.

Before introducing all the speakers I briefly mentioned SourceForge’s open source strategy regarding Allura (coverage), the fully open source platform backing SourceForge, now incubated at the Apache Software Foundation. Doing so we didn’t give away our ‘crown jewels’, we just strengthen our position by welcoming others to innovate, yet giving our communities more control over of their projects.

Ross Gardler – Apache Software Foundation board member, OpenDirective Founder and one of Allura’s mentors – shared with the audience his understanding about what forges are and what are they aimed for. In his own words:

Building open source software is about social interaction and the good governance of those interactions. It is not about providing better forge tools and it is certainly not about trying to make forges full of tools that encourage a community to fracture rather thancollaborate. In my opinion the focus should be on people not tools.

His speech was really enlightening, and I very much appreciated his positive feedback about the first step the Apache Allura podling is moving at the ASF. Ross pointed us also to a project called simal focused on harvesting data about projects (using DOAP) and making it available to query. Described as follows:

No stats, no tools, no magic hammers, just pointers to resources and people and their social graphs within project communities.

Last but not least after his talk we spent some time discussing about forge, and among audience’s input it worth to mention Karl Fogel’s book on “Producing Open Source” and “Open Advice” Edited by Lydia Pintscher.

Scott Wilson – Service Manager at OSS Watch and Assistant Director of CETIS – talked about the differences between open source development processes and app stores, posing interesting questions about how the ‘distribution dilemma’ could be approached. Stephen Walli – OuterCurve Technical Director – during the Q&A session joined the conversation to recap that authors have always the option to re-license their works with different licenses (as seen from companies like Microsoft and alike).

Stijin Goedertier – manager of PWc and ADMS Working Group representitive – talked about the AMDS.SW metadata vocabulary aimed at describing software artifacts. The idea behind the ADMS effort – something we have been participating as formerly mentioned on this blog (coverage) – is to make easier to find, and link open source software on the web.

Olivier Berger & Christian Bayle of FusionForge presented the state of the art on the advances of interoperability of FLOSS forges from the COCLICO projects. FusionForge is the only open source forge that implements the ADMS.SW metadata approach, but as they explained they are thriving to manage upstream/downstream open source relationships.

Miguel Ponce de Leon (TSSG) presented the just started PROSE project. Through the presentation “Empowering FLOSS in European Projects” Miguel explained PROSE project’s goal, whose objective is to accelerate the adoption of open source software on EU ICT projects.

The last speech was given by Laurent Charles, Enalean’s CEO. He shared his own experience with the Tuleap open ALM.

The IT program covers a broad range of computer technology related fields, and has specializations in networking, databases, programming, and various other areas. Students are exposed to a wide variety of computing platforms, so that they don’t get into a job interview situation and have to admit that they only have training on Microsoft products. Or only Linux products, for that matter. A breadth of experience is pure gold in an interview situation.

Hazem Said, the new head of that department, was my kind host at the game, and we talked about a variety of ways that Open Source can feature in an IT curriculum. I’m really excited about the kinds of things that are in the future for this program. We talked about having students participate in healthy, mature Open Source projects as part of their training. This would give them experience not only in software programming, but also in project management, cross-cultural communication, customer support, and marketing, among other things.

When I was in college – which wasn’t so very long ago – there were some computer classes, which were mostly programming, but nothing that covered the real discipline of Information Technology in the way that I saw on Wednesday. It gives me a great deal of hope for the next generation of IT professionals that come of this program, and other programs like it around the world.

By the way, if you’re ever invited to a basketball game by the head of a University department, do a little research, and don’t wear a shirt with the other team’s color. (Really, it was an honest mistake!)

OWASP (The Open Web Application Security Project) has announced their 2011 Open Source Showcase as a part of the OWASP AppSec USA Conference. The conference itself is September 20-23 in Minneapolis, MN, with the Open Source Showcase running Sept 22-23. The Open Source Showcase is designed to let you spread the word about your open source project. Although there is a focus on security-related apps, the showcase is open to everyone. From their site:

What a perfect place to let people know about the open source project you work so hard on! To apply for inclusion in the Open Source Showcase, visit the OSS section of the OWASP AppSec Site.

The AppSec USA Conference is a fantastic opportunity to learn from, and network and collaborate with fellow developers interested in security best practices on the Web. At ticket prices starting at just $75 for students, it’s a steal! For more information, we encourage you to visit the AppSec USA site.

Learn more at www.redhat.com/summit

The theme of the 11th O’Reilly OSCON is “Open for Business: Sustaining, Applying, and Expanding Open Source To Change the World.”

This deeply technical conference includes visionary keynotes, revelatory sessions, and in-depth, hands-on tutorials — something for everyone, covering all aspects of open source, arranged in 17 tracks with hundreds of topics. Register now using discount code os09sf to save an additional $100 at: http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009

Maker Faire is a family fun, two-day faire to MAKE, create, learn, invent, CRAFT, recycle, think, play and be inspired by celebrating arts, crafts, engineering, food, music, science and technology.

4th Annual Maker Faire Bay Area

Following on President Obama’s call to “begin again the work of remaking America”, Maker Faire 2009 will be organized around the theme of Re-Make America. Held in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 30-31, Maker Faire celebrates what President Obama called “the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.” Maker Faire will showcase individual creativity and grassroots innovation in the largest festival devoted to DIY culture and technology in the country.

http://pledgie.com/campaigns/2926