Mozilla Education Planet

The presentation slate for FSOSS 2009 has been finalized, and it looks like a interesting and diverse line-up including such topics as:

• Apache Qpid (AMQP)
• technical writing and documentation
• Mozilla Dehydra and DXR tools
• Processing.js
• open source in South Africa's universities
• communication in open source projects

...and more.

I'm looking forward to a great conference! If you're within driving distance of Toronto, please consider joining us on October 30. Advance registration -- and the corresponding discount -- ends this weekend as the Toronto Open Source Week gets underway.

I have had the honour of informally judging a debate entitled "Which Open Source License is Best?", held this past Monday by the FOSS Learning Center. Unfortunately I could not watch the debate live, so I've had to wait for the videos to be processed and posted - my apologies for the delay.

Each debater made an excellent case for the license they represented:

• Michael Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation - Eclipse Public License (EPL)

• Matt Asay, VP Business Development, Alfresco - GNU General Public License (GPL)

• David Maxwell, Open Source Strategist, Coverity - Berkeley Software Distibution License (BSD)

I come to this debate not only as an professor, but as a software developer, a consultant to the SME sector, and as a participant in the Fedora project. There was at least one point made in favor of each license that I found notable: that the EPL guarantees perpetual freedom of code, but enables proprietary products to be constructed on top; that the GPL fundamentally creates an atmosphere of trust; and that the BSD license's brevity and simplicity provides reassuring clarity and confidence.

Of the three cases presented, I found the case for the GPL to be the most compelling. I hadn't previously considered that the GPL creates an environment of trust, but that resonated deeply with my experience and particularly with my observations within the Fedora project and as a consultant.

But more importantly, as the debaters concluded: each of these licenses has a place in the Open Source ecosystem, and the users of each license generally agree about much more than they disagree. Long live Open Source!

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Debate video and the conclusions of the other judges.

The first edition of Red Hat's POSSE program -- Professors' Open Source Summer Experience -- kicks off tonight (Sunday) and continues through Friday. Based on the premise that Open Source is best taught by someone with one foot in the academic world and one foot in an open source community, this week will be an immersive experience for five professors from around North America.

I look forward to teaching this program with my colleague David Humphrey (also from Seneca). It's going to be an intense learning experience for us as well, because we've never passed along our open source teaching model in a bootcamp format.

The brainchild of Greg DeKoenigsberg, POSSE's goal is to pilot a person-to-person approach to spreading the teaching of open community-based open source, and to be the first in a long line of professors' bootcamps around the world.

Working in the Open, in the Open Source Way

We'd love to have you join us online during POSSE. You can follow the play-by-play via @posse2009 on Twitter, or better yet, interact directly with the participants on the #teachingopensource-posse channel on the Freenode IRC network. Because we're teaching community-based open source, you will also see the POSSE participants popping up in various open source projects, including Mozilla and Fedora.

Help Wanted: Fedora Packaging Sponsors

We're going to be doing some Fedora packaging. If you're a Fedora packaging sponsor and have a bit of time later this week to accelerate some FE-NEEDSPONSOR cases, I'd appreciate your help Wednesday onward. Ian Weller (who is himself a packaging sponsor) and I will be working directly with the participants and doing initial reviews.

The monthly TeachingOpenSource conference call is coming up on Monday. The focus of this call will be the textbook project that Greg DeKoenigsberg is starting up, and we'll also have an update on the Teaching Open Source Summit '09 (TOSS09) and other TOS projects.

The calls are open to everyone, so if you're in any way involved with or interested in the teaching of community-based open source, please feel free to join the call -- and if you're not already part of the TeachingOpenSource.org community, please jump right in!

Continue reading "TeachingOpenSource Conference Call - Monday July 6" »

For the eighth year in a row, the Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca College is holding the Free Software and Open Source Symposium. This year's event will be on Friday, October 30, with optional hands-on workshops on Thursday, October 29. We're expecting around 300 open source developers, community leaders, business people, and students from Toronto, throughout Ontario, and around the world.

Are you passionate about an open source project? Do you have new insight into open source (or open content, or open formats)? Tell the world: we've put out a call for great presentation proposals on the FSOSS website.

Registration for FSOSS 2009 will open in June... and yes, we pronounce it "eff-sauce"!