Sessions

Open Source Development - The Dark Side

*
Accepted Session
Culture
Short form
osb2009-0223
Scheduled: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 from 5:00 – 5:45pm in Burnside
Session notes

Excerpt

Navigating the Darkside of the Open Source Development Community. A decidedly sarcastic and hopefully humorous look at the dark under-belly of the Open Source Development Culture.

Description

Do you love the idea of an Open Source Development community but frequently find yourself battling:

  • Application components that require chmod 777 to work correctly
  • The need for a law degree to understand implications of OSI licenses and how they mix and match
  • Scattered documentation
  • OS Distros that divide up your configuration files
  • Cargo Cult mentalities
  • Learning to use five different source control systems
  • Dealing with communities where developers are highly specialized and not technologists
  • Smack talk on the development mailing list and in irc channels
  • Meritocracies that aren’t
  • Benevolent Dictators that aren’t so benevolent or competent
  • Upgrade paths that require the correct astronomical alignment, a sirocco, and twin albino goats to successfully complete with no data-loss
  • And more!

Jennifer Redman, a veteran user of and occasional attempted contributor to Open Source software explores the labyrinth of the community development model and the trials and tribulations of mixing with technically diverse “open”-communities, from a primarily end-user perspective.

Tags

darkside, meritocracy, benevolent dictator, sirocco, cargo cult, chmod, sarcasm

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Speaker

  • Jennifer Redman

    Buunabet

    Biography

    While serving as an executive team member for small and mid-scale technology companies, Jennifer gained extensive experience developing, deploying and managing teams responsible for software development, technical infrastructure, and customer support.

    Jennifer has over thirteen-years of hands-on technical experience as a data center and information systems architect and administrator.

    When not tinkering with her servers and installing new flavors of unix or Open Source apps, Jennifer travels to interesting and sometimes “you went where?” sort of places. Previous careers include canvassing for Greenpeace and as a staff member on a national (and successful) presidential campaign. She also reads a lot of books.

    In 2009, Jennifer is participating in her first Google Summer of Code as an organization admin and mentor.

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