Christos Bacharakis

Two weeks ago – 27/11/2012 – , along with two great FOSS contributors shared a session in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece regarding “Open Source and Research“.

The event was organized by the society of the post graduate department of physics and math of the Aristotle University.

Kostas Koudaras –  OpenSUSE contributor – explained the differences between free source and open source and elaborated on the movement/culture of Free Source software. In addition he explained the philosophy of contributing upstream and generally what do you achieve by contributing in FOSS projects.

Salih Elim – Open Source strategist at ErgoQ –  presented where free/open source applies in day life such as routers, cars, software etc. Later on the audience got amazed by a slide he shared with companies who use and support open source such as redhat, mozilla, google, toyota, ibm, nasa etc. In the end Salih, presented some open source projects which were a products of academic research and explained why should the community of an academic research project has to use, adopt and produce open source software/hardware.

In the last part of the session I – Fedora Project contributor, Mozilla –  presented the benefits of working/creating inside a community especially if that is an open source one. I tried to motivate people to join active FOSS communities or great their own, finding people with common interested. I shared a list with the most active Greek communities such as the Fedora’s Project, Mozilla’s,OpenSUSE’s and explained them why these communities rock, what do we achieve by contributing in these projects and invited them to join us!  I am pretty sure that people understood that through open source communities they can build the future of the open software/hardware as other foundation and foss companies (Red Hat, Mozilla) did in the past.

It was a successful event considering the fact that we had around 75 people, an 30′ session with discussing and answering to questions after the event and a lot of feedback.

I want to thank Thanos Pavloudis from the society of the post graduate department of physics and math (from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), who organized this event, made it happen and want to organize more events regarding Open Source.

Some more photos from the event can be found in my picasa web album.

Till the next time, keep hacking the world 😉