foss: technologies communities and society

Free Open Source Software

Technologies, Communities, and the Society

About me

Name: Ahmed Mekkawy AKA linuxawy From: Alexandria, Egypt. Email: ahmed@linuaxwy.org Blog: http://linuxawy.org Work: Solutions (SysAdmins) Team Leader in

eSpace Technologies (http://www.espace.com.eg). Activities: Egypt GNU/Linux Users Group

(EGLUG)

FOSS in a nutshell

Free Software was first made to get rid of companies monopoly, and to keep software free.

GNU and Richard Stallman (RMS) Linux and Linus Trovalds. Free Software Vs. Open Source. Free Speech Vs. Free Beer. FOSS doesn't have to be publicly released. Can be

handed only to the customer.

FOSS & Community: Learning & Knowledge

Freedom of learning is one of the main aspects in FOSS.

FOSS gives perfect chance for learning and mangling with the community

It should be heavily adopted by the academia (like Berkley and MIT).

The initiative made by FOSS resulted creation of other entities such as wikipedia, and even creating the term 'open culture'.

FOSS & Community:Philosophy, Freedom, & Society

De-centralized knowledge is a must in FOSS. 4 Freedoms. The know-how The Idea of creating a community work based

mainly on contributions that breaks the monopoly of companies/entities.

Every personnel can be productive, not only get some new ideas, but also implementing them and creating ready to use product.

FOSS & Community:Development Methodologies

Distributed Development. Development team is not static, adding and

removing developers should be an easy thing to do. Costs much less, cause contributions do save your

time. Results in a more rigid software due to excessive

testing and feedbacks.

Arab world & FOSS:Technology Adoption

Technology Adoption is increasing in the Arab world. Mainly due to: Web Technologies. Lower Cost. FOSS activists & Techies. NGOs.

How to push FOSS adoption more in: Home Users.. Professional Techies. Companies. Academia. Governments

Arab world & FOSS:Technical Problems

Low contribution from the Arab world resulted some technical problems.

Arabic support in lots of software. Arabic translations: missing or not satisfactory in

lots of software packages. The weight of arabic community in the FOSS

community is far less than it should/can be.

Arabic FOSS Communities:Current Situation

Lots of lugs exist, but how much is really active? linuxac.org => very active, but adopting a strict

arabic-only policy which makes most of the community is somehow isolated of the foreign lugs, which breaks the idea of a world-wide community.

Arabeyes: itools, wordlist, translations, ... etc

Arabic FOSS Communities:Problems

The idea of contribution itself isn't spread in the Arab world.

Relation between community and profitable companies.

Problems in creating/organizing a community based on contributions.

Leadership problem. Volunteers Continuity Problem. Creating an crossing borders community may have

problems with some governments (even local communities?)

Arabic FOSS Communities:Collaboration

Creating an entity that holds all arabic communities together.

Periodical events that gather activist techies. Business between companies that adopt FOSS. Communication Channels between arabic

communities & entities. Suggestion??