Image from the Software Freedom Day wiki.
I have been tasked with finding speakers in Melbourne for Software Freedom Day (Saturday 19th September). And I have grand visions! So:
I am looking for people who are interested in helping share the awesome that is free software, by giving a talk or tute on Software Freedom Day (Saturday 19th September). Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to communicate to a beginners or intermediate audience, in approximately 25 minutes, some project or aspect of free software that gives you warm fuzzies and helps you sleep well at night knowing the world is a better place, or at least makes you go, “Huh. Neat.”
I have come up with some ideas to get you thinking, below. Further notes are also at http://wiki.cc.com.au/SFD09/Talks. Please write me a comment or an email when you know what you want to enthuse about.
Introductory
Introductory talks should either be about
- something conceptual/historical, or
- introduction to dual-booting/Live CD etc (the very first steps in making the leap to Linux)
- open source software that is stable on Windows or is web-based. ie. not about software that is only stable on Linux.
Possible talks:
- What is software freedom?
- incl. history of free software movement
- Free software licenses
- could perhaps just be a component in a general talk on software freedom
- How do open source projects work?
- how do they get started, how do people contribute, how do people know what to do, who makes final decisions, forking
- How to become an open source developer
- How to find a project, how to check if it suits you, how to find easy ways to start, submitting patches?
- Open formats/standards & why they matter
- Introduction to free content licensing (Creative Commons)
- Open access (academic publishing)
- OLPC project
- Firefox
- Thunderbird
- Wordpress
- Inkscape
- OpenOffice
- Audacity
- GnuCash
- Some feed reader (plus: what are feeds)
- [Your Favourite Free Software Package Goes Here]
- MediaWiki/Wikipedia/some other wiki (contributing)
- HTML/CSS (web design using some particular package?)
- Back-ups
- Demystifying bug trackers (could look at a few – Bugzilla, trac?)
- Programming for kids with Squeak/Alice/Scratch
- Introduction to IRC
Intermediate
- Beginning the command line
- How to start your own web site (getting started with shared webhosting using open source tools)
- Beginning source control (concepts + basic commands in svn, bzr)
- Any of the software mentioned in Introductory, but with a more advanced take (starting to look at modifying it, e.g. extensions/plugins, how to tweak it yourself)
- Using a debugger
- Practical programming with Python (scripting – solving ‘real world’ problems)
- Understanding the Linux stack (kernel, window manager, desktop environment, utilities, etc)
- Managing software in Linux (aptitude etc)
- Introduction to databases (not just SQL…)
- Introduction to MVC framework?
- Drupal
- Greasemonkey or more generally, Firefox extensions
- JavaScript
Workshops
Any of the above-mentioned topics, especially the programming-related ones. Best to take on some practical task – “how to do X using Y”.
ps. Don’t think you are not qualified to talk if you are a beginner or a recently-reformed beginner. Recently-reformed beginners are some of the best people to communicate with beginners, because they remember precisely just how daunting and baffling everything was…
Last week I went to a seminar about tax concessions for not-for-profits. One of the things I found out/had confirmed was that there is no legal definition of “charity” or what causes etc can be described as “charitable”. Well — kind of. Like the UK Australia relies on centuries-old law, solidified a bit with some case law (courts’ decisions). The government did attempt to define “charity” and “charitable” with the Charities Bill 2003, but it all got a bit too hard and didn’t end up going anywhere. Nonetheless, some types of organisations have benefited from the government deciding to explicitly set them as “charitable”, perhaps rather than waiting for case law to go the right way.
Thus there was the Extension of Charitable Purpose Bill 2004:
The statutory extension allows:
• organisations providing child care to the public on a non-profit basis;
• self-help bodies with open and non-discriminatory membership; and
• closed or contemplative religious orders that offer prayerful intervention to the public,
to be treated as charities for the purposes of all Commonwealth legislation.
So now you can be a charity based on law from the 1600s, case law, or a specific statutory extension. Good-o.
This got me thinking: what if developing free software was declared a charitable purpose? After all, it benefits society, in a somewhat indirect way: better quality code, more extensible and adaptable code (papering over the failings of the market), greater software user freedom and control, greater technology awareness amongst more of the population, and it encourages innovation and empowers all sectors by removing/lowering price barriers to software.
On the other hand, unlike childcare, it often runs on the smell of an oily rag, so the argument for the need is a bit weak. And it’s not too sexy; we’re not talking about The Family after all, just some random geeks. (Right…?) Also, the proprietary software business sector would probably doubt cry foul at a kind of “competitive advantage” for free software folk. (Although there are commercial childcare operators — or at least there used to be — commercial software has done a much better job of marketing themselves as the Right Way to develop software.)
Having DGR status (tax-deductible donations) would be nice, though.
Dear readers, please help me brainstorm here. What instances can you think of where a business has released semi-mature/mature software under an open source license, where previously it was proprietary? AND the business managed to foster a community of developers around it, while their developers continued to work on it?
There are a few examples where companies have “dumped” software under an open source license where they no longer cared to look after it themselves (acquired software, or just discontinued products). And there would be some examples where a company has began development of a package as open source from the very start (Laconica, Drizzle?). But what about the middle case?
The only examples I can think of are
So, regarding the problem of how you get a developer community interested, Java and Launchpad seem to have it lucky, as their users are typically programmers. OO.org has a more general user base, but OTOH they also had a well-defined and much-loathed proprietary enemy, to galvanise developers into contributing. What if your userbase is not technical, but you don’t have a clearly defined enemy in this way?
And moreover, what if you are not a gigantic company that already has some cred in the open source world? What if you are a small business? How do you demonstrate your good will and get peopled interested?
And is that case any different to the case of individuals wanting to increase awareness and development of their pet open source project?
