OSCON 2016

Dr. Kyla McMullen spoke at OSCON's morning keynote session today. She was the first African-American woman to graduate with a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. And it says a lot about tech's lack of inclusiveness that this landmark achievement happened in 2012. These days she is Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Florida. In her keynote, Dr. McMullen explained that as a child she was a tinkerer and reader—like most of us in the room...

Christian Grail gave a talk at OSCON 2016 titled: "How to convince your manager to go open source." I thought the perspective was going to be from the user side but it was from the employee side, about convincing your manager to open source the projects at your company. "Isn't the quality going to suffer?" There is a perception that when we're only depending on our internal team, we can control the quality. The fact is that with open source, you have nice lean code and the quality is usually better because it's being worked on all of the time, regardless of where and by whom. The advantage with most open source software is that you get a community, so you have more than just your team of X developers...

Open source software seems like a perfect fit for government IT projects. Developers can take advantage of existing code bases and, it's hoped, mold that code to their needs quickly and at less cost than developing code from scratch. Over the last few years, governments in the U.S. and abroad have been more closely embracing open source. However, agencies at all levels of U.S. government are still wary of open source and can be reluctant to adopt it. It's still not easy for government projects to use open source or for developers employed in the public sector to contribute their work to open source project...