Oops! The downside to staying up pretty much all night talking about FOSS, life, and everything else under the sun is that the next morning comes WAY to quickly!

So, after going to one of the local malls to buy a long sleeve shirt and picking up some food, I finally managed to get to the venue. As I alluded to in my previous post, I spent more time thinking about people and community than the technology that drew me to the conference in the first place. Probably the biggest example of this was a talk by Britt Yazel surrounding Scientists and open source.

What could be better than a Linux-powered science computer? Its more secure, more stable, faster than the other platforms…but the problem? Lack of packages and supporting libraries to carry out complex scientific analysis! What’s worse is that universities, research facilities, and science labs and stuck running Windows and a few proprietary applications that charge thousands of dollars per license per year!!! That is literally millions of US Dollars…tax payer money… being paid to a couple of businesses that have a corner on the scientific market! Now that bugs me on a number of levels!

We as an open source community need to branch out. We need to shake this nerd in their parent’s basement stigma we have carried for so many years, get out there, find needs, and build solutions to fix those needs! Instead of idling in IRC rooms waiting for some project we can bash, we should be out there fixing problems in our world!

After a though-provoking afternoon, we all met up for pizza and celebrated the release of GNOME 3.30 and followed that up with some vintage arcade games 🙂