Changes

The speaker for the talk “” , “Community Building and the Architecture of Participation,” was Greg De Koenigsberg. He is a community designer architect for Red Hat. Though he has been with the community since 2001, he is as enthusiastic as a newcomer in the community. Only one word can describe this kind of speech and energy of the speaker and that word is “wOw”. Here is his website http://people.redhat.com/gdk/. This might interest you.

Everybody in the open source world knows the answer that open source products are betterthan other products. However, that is only a few of them knows the reason why they are herebehind it. But Gerg Greg provided some numbers, facts and solid arguments to show how open source products are better than copyright products. In the graph, growth of a certain an open source community is shown. It The graph says that number of features increases as number of contributors increases. And inversely, number of bugs decreases as number of contributors increases. It This scenario is the same thing scenario for copyright products. However, after copyright products have some limitations. After some time copyright products cannot afford more contributors to the project. So, the product growth remains steady, not increasing. On the other side, nobody can limit the number of contributors in open source community. So the Hence, product growth is never going to stop. More and more features are going to be added by more and more contributorsin open source world. Even the speed velocity of growth will increaseis increasing. PlusIn addition, more and more bugs are going to be fixedvoluntarily. In short, limited amount of money will limit the number of contributors in the copyright product. While In contrast, in the open source product products, people don’t have to worry about money so much because so many people are just volunteering.

“Release early, release often” is another motto 'mantra' which helps growth of the community growth. It means that a product should be up-to-dateddate. Let’s say As an example; Microsoft takes around 3-4 years of time between each releases of Microsoft office. And everybody knows the The differences between Office 2003 and Office 2007. The difference is are so huge many that it is they are sometimes hard to adopt. But However, if they would have released often with little bit of changes, users might adopt it more easily. On the other hand, anyone can get the latest trunk version of Mozilla Firefox from the trunk and use it. In this case, it is much easier to adopt changes because small changes do not affect users that much.

Another important topic he raised was devoted to He also discussed the importance of contributorsin the community. He strongly believes that the community is zero nothing without contributors. That is the reason why he emphasised on making contributors happy and satisfied. If contributors are satisfied, community growth can be unbelievable. And if contributors are not satisfied, the community starts breaking. In short, “contributors are God” to him.

Another quote he was promoting emphasised on was, “trust the community.” Anyone who want to be a part of the community he/she should have faith in the community and community members. Newcomers should believe in the seniors and try to walk on seniors’ path to success. Similarly, seniors should not misguide newcomers in the community. In short, It is a both side responsibility for of newcomers and seniorsto trust the community and make community running. If everybody trusts everybody in the community, the community will become a great place for success everybody - contributors and growthusers.

It is very hard to conclude and compare two great talks in a paragraph. Still However, let me just give a try:;

Both spokespersons were are masters in their fields. Dan is master in Thunderbird community while Greg is master in Linux community. Now Hence, it seems obvious that Dan’s talk would be more focused on Thunderbird community. However, Greg’s talk was not specific to Linux community. It was in general for and generalized to the whole open source community. Dan’s talk was more about responsibilities for of a community member of the community; : what a member should do and what he a member should not do to make the community and the product better. But, Greg was more focusing on what a community can do and should do to make contributors happier and more satisfied. Though both were targeting different part of the open source worldcommunity, they both were aiming to make the community utopiaa better place to work.

Talks in FSOSS and its talks somehow conflicted with some of my few ideas that I was having for the about open source communityand products. First of all, I used to think that there is only one open source community exists- Mozilla Inc. But, when I attended some talks, especially above mentioned two talks, I came to realise that the whole open source community is made of so many small open source communities. Everybody is totally different from each other just to accomplish the single goal- the goal of free software and open source development. Just an example: Mozilla corporation is providing free software and their source code to make the web faster, safer and reliable. Similarly, Fedora people are providing free operating systems. In short, both are making the software world providing free softwares for users and free source code for developers. I was totally amazed by the information that Microsoft also supports open for all userssource community. You can find more information about it from http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/ .

Secondly, Dan’s talk introduced me to the topic of Debian effect. Dan was denying the existence of the Debian effect in the Thunderbird community. But, I am having a strange feeling that Thunderbird community is also affected by Debian effect because nothing is perfect in the world. The way some people argued in the room created a negative feeling for the effect. One thing I learned from the discussion of Debian effect is to do my part in the community ignoring what others are doing.

After Honestly, after attending Greg's talk, I became his fan. I think that he is having the most clear concept for the open source community. Until todayTill date, I was just assuming that free softwares are better. And the The major reason why it is better is , "it is FREE"in sense of money. Users do not need to pay for it. In additionBut, he Greg showed features vs. contributors graph. The graph showed the growth was featuring relationship between number of contributors and bugs or features in features for the an open source products till infinityproduct or a copyright product. HoweverIt shows that, there is no growth in the copyright products after certain amount of time due to financial limitations. Exactly opposite than that, open source products do not have limitations in terms of money. In addition, Greg's talk give me an open minded vision looking to look into the community which focuses more on the contributors rather than community itself.

FSOSS was my first technical event I have ever attended in my life. I was a bit of nervous thinking that I am nothing compare to the people which who are coming to the conference. I was also afraid to talk to anybody in the conference but still I started the conversation with Mr. Dan. Surprisingly, he gave me a very warm invitation to talk for conversation and he interestingly discussed my problemsproject. He filled me with the confident to work in the open source community and gave me few tips to survive in the community. Overall, the event opened a door for me to the open source community and I am looking forward to carry on with the open source world.