Foss4Africa Paul Scott keynote
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The document discusses collaboration on free and open source software (FOSS) projects in Africa. It addresses challenges such as bandwidth constraints, the need for communication tools optimized for low bandwidth, and leveraging social media for marketing with limited budgets. It emphasizes sharing code and documentation through open licensing to benefit from peer review and contributions from the global FOSS community while mitigating legal risks from patents.
Foss4Africa Paul Scott keynote
- 1. FOSS in Africa FOSS Africa Convention Indaba Hotel April 2010 Paul Scott http://www.paulscott.za.net/
- 2. Casting a larger net Working collaboratively African talent
- 11. Communication is key How do you collaborate?
- 12. We need to use low(er) bandwidth friendly technology
- 13. Mailing lists, IRC, Web optimised for low bandwidth
- 14. Constant communication to create community
- 15. Everyone feels part of the community, no matter what the situation is!
- 16. Version Control What is version control?
- 17. Must be used in any collaborative effort
- 18. Not just for code, docs, wiki and images too!
- 19. Must be distributed and provide a central repository
- 20. Single point of truth for collab efforts
- 21. Able to operate in low bandwidth environments
- 22. Marketing Single most difficult thing to do
- 23. We have a culture of not thinking the best of ourselves
- 24. US and EU projects look to us for the lead (Drupal, Joomla! Etc)
- 25. Marketing costs a lot of money
- 26. Not many people experienced in tech/FOSS marketing and community building in Africa
- 27. Social Media Marketing can be achieved informally too
- 28. Search Twitter for #Chisimba! Constant tweets and updates from many sources
- 29. Subversion also tweets so stakeholders are made aware of progress constantly and in real time
- 30. Facebook group
- 31. Flickr group
- 32. Blogs, forum and Google Groups
- 33. IP / Patents IP laws are becoming restrictive
- 34. In SA, software patents are not yet a major risk, but have the potential to be soon.
- 35. US and EU patent systems can be limiting, but with careful licensing and distribution channels the risks can be mitigated.
- 36. MSN case
- 38. Licensing GPL is a Free license
- 39. Allows works to be used in commercial projects too
- 40. All we ask is that if you make enhancements THAT DO NOT CONTAIN YOUR BUSINESS MODEL (i.e. NON differentiating software), please share them and make the world a better place
- 41. Many other Free licenses, all in simple English and minimal legalese
- 42. Documentation The bane of a developers' existance!
- 43. Self documenting code is the norm in FOSS
- 44. Great docs can be generated autoatically from the sourcecode
- 45. User manuals are written more slowly, but do appear.
- 46. Great way to contribute to FOSS projects if you are not a coder!
- 47. Sharing is caring There is very little software that contains proprietary business process within the sourcecode
- 48. There is no reason not to release most source into the public domain. Who knows, you may even get some improvements free (as in beer)!
- 49. Leverage the FOSS communities and they will help you out. Contribute back for added fun and profit!
- 50. "The most fundamental way of helping other people, is to teach people how to do things better or how to better their lives. For people who use computers, this means sharing the recipes you use on your computer, in other words the programs you run." Richard Stallman Free Software Foundation.
- 51. What does Free mean? The freedom to run the program for any purpose
- 52. study how the program works, and to adapt it to your needs redistribute copies
- 53. improve the program, and release your improvements to the public. These freedoms require access to the source code Source code: if encrypt(password) == encryptedpassword, then login=1, end Compiled code: 001001011101010011001100001111011000110001110001101
- 54. What are you getting into? Huge e.g. IBM > 1 billion $ per year
- 55. e.g. 230K projects, 2M contributors @ sourceforge.net Well organised
- 57. User friendly ← written by users for users
- 58. Cross-platform ← recompile source code
- 59. High development pace ← reuse of best modules
- 60. High quality ← peer review, reuse = survival of the fittest
- 61. High security ← peer review, Unix origin, modular, encryption
- 62. Why FOSS? reduce (license) costs
- 66. easy to localize and customize
- 67. better quality (peer review, intrinsic-motivated developers)
- 68. increase security (security by design vs security by obscurity)
- 69. increase interoperability (open standards)
- 70. reduce dependencies from monopolies & foreign software companies
- 73. Perceived barriers Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about features?
- 75. sustainability?
- 76. support?
- 77. requirement to participate in the community?
- 78. Perceived barriers anti-competitive behaviour monopoly abuse
- 79. secret formats
- 80. secret protocols
- 81. data and vendor lock-ins
- 82. It comes down to Education “ We teach MS because that is what companies use” Companies “ We cannot use FOSS because our employees don't know it” Employees Growing number starts using FOSS at home
- 83. Not happy with inferior software at work
- 86. When to migrate? Time transitions at the end of existing contracts
- 87. at hardware / software upgrade times Consider migrating in phases servers
- 88. desktop applications -> multi-platform
- 89. -> web-based desktop OS
- 90. Key success factors resources to experiment
- 92. involvement of both technical and non-technical users in the selection process
- 93. choice for a new system which is in all aspects at least as good and easy as the previous one
- 94. reporting detailed migration plan to management and get their approval and support
- 95. in-house expertise with open source software and communities
- 96. contact with the developers and users community
- 97. The Open Way avoid local customization without contributing back
- 98. participating in the community establish an 'open source culture' of re-use, collaboration and sharing
- 100. Acknowledgements Pictures Doubt by Elenaa Marie (Flickr)
- 101. Lockin, claustrofobia by Laororo (Flickr) Slides Some slides remixed from Prof. Dr. Frederick Questier
- 102. Some slides remixed from Prof. Dr. Derek Keats
- 103. Some slides remixed from previous AVOIR slides All slides licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Sharealike
- 105. Online : http://www.chisimba.com Email : [email_address] We are grateful to the IDRC, USAID, the Department of Science and Technology, UNESCO and Sun Microsystems for financial and other support to the AVOIR project. We are also grateful to those organizations who had enough confidence to contract us to develop applications even though we were then unproven .