Software Freedom Day 2008
On September 20, 2008, Sun organized the first-ever Software Freedom Day at Virginia Tech. The event was a resounding success and involved many in the VT community.
The idea behind Software Freedom Day is to celebrate Free/Open Source Software as a community. Because the community is so important to FOSS, I took it upon myself to involve as many people in the VT software community as possible.
At the presentation, four student groups were key in organizing and advertising the event. The Association for Computing Machinery, the Association of Women in Computing, the Virginia Tech Linux/Unix User's Group, and Free Culture at VT were all instrumental in coordinating the event. We were able to hand away A TON Sun swag in addition to free Ubuntu CDs. And of course, Sun was sure to give away free pizza and drinks.
I was the first presenter of the night, talking about some of the cool new technologies that Sun is putting out there. I showed off Netbeans, OpenSolaris, and DTrace. The crowd was very tech-savvy and immediately recognized the "cool" factor of some of these new technologies. I was also sure to discuss, from a corporate level, why Sun is so committed to open source. The message of FOSS really resonates with college students and I wanted to show them that they have a friend in Sun.
The next presenter was Jonathan Turner. He presented on a new programming language, Minnow, that he was working on. You can check out his work at http://www.minnow-lang.org/. After Jonathan's presentation, we all enjoyed some pizza courtesy of Sun. Following the intermission, Dr. Godmar Back (VT faculty and my Operating Systems professor) talked about a project he is working on called LibX (http://libx.org/). And finally, Mike Taczak, from the local company Mailtrust, presented on an open source project he was working on called Funambol (http://www.funambol.com/).
All in all, the event was a success. The VT community came together to talk about FOSS, free pizza and software was distributed, and Sun sponsored it all. Hopefully this will be indicative of the events for the remainder of the school year.
Check out my presentation!
The idea behind Software Freedom Day is to celebrate Free/Open Source Software as a community. Because the community is so important to FOSS, I took it upon myself to involve as many people in the VT software community as possible.
At the presentation, four student groups were key in organizing and advertising the event. The Association for Computing Machinery, the Association of Women in Computing, the Virginia Tech Linux/Unix User's Group, and Free Culture at VT were all instrumental in coordinating the event. We were able to hand away A TON Sun swag in addition to free Ubuntu CDs. And of course, Sun was sure to give away free pizza and drinks.
I was the first presenter of the night, talking about some of the cool new technologies that Sun is putting out there. I showed off Netbeans, OpenSolaris, and DTrace. The crowd was very tech-savvy and immediately recognized the "cool" factor of some of these new technologies. I was also sure to discuss, from a corporate level, why Sun is so committed to open source. The message of FOSS really resonates with college students and I wanted to show them that they have a friend in Sun.
The next presenter was Jonathan Turner. He presented on a new programming language, Minnow, that he was working on. You can check out his work at http://www.minnow-lang.org/. After Jonathan's presentation, we all enjoyed some pizza courtesy of Sun. Following the intermission, Dr. Godmar Back (VT faculty and my Operating Systems professor) talked about a project he is working on called LibX (http://libx.org/). And finally, Mike Taczak, from the local company Mailtrust, presented on an open source project he was working on called Funambol (http://www.funambol.com/).
All in all, the event was a success. The VT community came together to talk about FOSS, free pizza and software was distributed, and Sun sponsored it all. Hopefully this will be indicative of the events for the remainder of the school year.
Check out my presentation!
