Building a Great FOSDEM Devroom

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I remember the first time I rolled into the ULB Solbosch campus in Brussels. It was 2014, just after I first started with Red Hat. I was there to attend my first FOSDEM, the free software conference that holds a unique and prominent place in the technology world.

Even though I had been a writer and a community manager in the Linux and free software ecosystem for nearly 14 years, I had never had the opportunity to actually attend. (Pro tip: media companies are cheap.) So looking around that gray chilly day, I had to take a moment to take it all in.

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Celebrating 20 Years of the Apache Software Foundation

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This past March, the Apache Software Foundation celebrated a significant milestone in its history: 20 years as a preeminent organization in the world of open source software.

Back in San Francisco in 1999, the original 21 founders, including members of the Apache Group (creators of the Apache HTTP Server) formed The Apache Software Foundation. The Apache HTTP Server project continues to be one of the best known of the ASF’s 350 projects, with 80 million Websites being served by this platform. (more…)

The View from KiwiPyCon – X

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The New Zealand Python User Group ran the  tenth national Python conference in New Zealand last week.  Kiwi PyCon is aimed at promoting and educating people about the Python programming language.  Included as speakers and attendees are some big names from the global python and developer community who travel to New Zealand annually for the conference including Red Hat’s own Graham Dumpleton who delivered a talk on building interactive learning environments using Jupyterhub. (more…)

Licenses Are Not Business Models

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Fedora shaded cupcakesThere has been a lot of discussion about the relationship between open source and business of late. The rise of “hybrid licenses” designed to prevent mega-users like cloud providers from mass distributing and supporting open source software, thus depriving the software’s stewarding vendors of potential revenue, has generated a lot of content.

A personal favorite of mine is my colleague Tom Callaway’s May 4 “cupcake” Twitter thread, where delicious confectioneries are used to explain how these new licenses are supposed to work and why the open source community at large are up in arms about these new approaches. (more…)

Celebrating Software Freedom Day 2019

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Software Freedom Day logoSeptember 21 is a significant day for those of us who work and play in the world of free and open source software (FLOSS). Software Freedom Day, a global celebration of FLOSS falls on this date!

It is always pretty amazing: the choice to share software and see it built freely for its own sake has influenced innovation within IT for over three decades. Technologies like cloud computing, big data, containers… these all were successful not in spite of FLOSS, but because of it.

Out commitment to free software has never wavered at Red Hat. It is ingrained in the very fabric of our culture, and we enjoy celebrating this fact every day.

We hope you can take some time today to mark the occasion, and enjoy the successes and relationships you have made while working with free software. I know we are!

 

 

Getting Inclusion Right at DevConf.US

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DevConfUS LogoFor some people in the IT sector, attending conferences is par for the course in learning more about technology and networking with people in their area of interest. But while many people take attending such events for granted, in reality, it can be a struggle of time, resources, or finances to get to a tech conference. The organizers of DevConf.US have recognized this and have made significant efforts to try to remove the barriers that are preventing attendees from getting in the doors.

For Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Senior Program Manager for Diversity + Inclusion Outreach at Red Hat, the key is to focus on all elements of diversity and inclusion.  (more…)