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''“It is an event aimed at bringing together industry, developers, educators and the community and any other interested parties to discuss open source, open web, and academic/industry partnerships.”'' – Source, [http://www.fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2011/ FSOSS 2011]
There were two presentations that I really wanted to attend (which I will discuss later in this paper) and I was left with two options – either pay the registration fee or go in as a volunteer. I decided to go for the latter as my current financial standings is not in my favour.
==Mike Hoye: How to start an Internet Famous Business with Open Source Software==
One of the presentations I attended was from Mike Hoye. Mike started a new internet based business in late 2010. He did this after he quit his job and was given a 1 one year deadline to start a new business and bring in profit. His company launched products like BeSDS and BerrySync. His presentation is to talk about what he did right or wrong and the lessons he learnt from it.
As an individual trying to launch a technological product in a highly saturated market, it is hard to deliver a stable and competitive product within an estimated timeline. According to Mike, one of the biggest challenging was trying to resist the temptation to add features to the product to make it stand out from the others. This often ends in missing the deadline, while the company is losing money in the meantime.
Chris Tyler is a professor in Seneca College. From his blog, Chris is a ''“Christian, college professor, computer programmer, system administrator, author, and consultant. My specialty is open source, particularly Fedora Linux.”''
In his presentation, Chris Tyler believes that the future of computing is going to the web. This concept is currently being used and advertised by big corporations. One of the most common examples that are seen is "To the cloud" by Microsoft. The advantages of going to the cloud are numerous. Users are able to access their content on different machine anytime which is stored on some servers hosted by companies that sell "cloud" server space.
According to Chris, the future of the web can be sub-categorized into Consumer of content, creator of content and storing of content. As a consumer of content, Chris meant all users of the internet. As a user of the web, we all consume content made by some other individual or company at one point or another. The open source community had been highly active in helping users consume content from the web. Open source software has made rapid progress in this field. Another category that open source software is highly active and has made rapid progress is in the storing of content. Open source software that helps user stores data on the cloud have improved dramatically over the years and can compete effectively with proprietary software.
One sub-category that the open source has been coming up short when compared to proprietary software is the creator of content. According to Chris, creators of content are of many types. Whenever a user creates an email, he/she is a creator of content. The problem with open source software as a creator of content is that they are lacking any good product that caters to multimedia users. I think this is caused mainly due to that fact that programmers have always been bad designers.
==What did I learn?==
Both the presentation brought out a lot of good points. I tried to develop an idea with a friend over the summer and the reason for failing in that venture was trying to add more feature to make the product stand out. This was the biggest mistake we made as we kept pushing back the deadline due to scope creep. After listening to the presentation by Mike Hoye, I was able to understand many things that seemed obvious at the time. The reason why I failed in my attempt to create a product out of my idea may be due to my lack of experience.
==Conclusion==
