You can watch videos of some of the sessions of Free Software & Open Source Days / 2009 at fazlamesai.net. Featured sessions are:
Freedays was great as usual. Seminars and workshops were interesting and informative. In my opinion organization was flawless as well. I think this is a result of LKD and Bilgi University teams’ coordinating together1.
Nice presentation by Enver Altın. Short slides2, confident, humorous and to-the-point style. Careful preparation is usually evident in good presentations. Overall I liked it very much. What he says basically is:
Some LKD people tried to undermine the seminar becase it contained criticism of LKD. I don’t know what were they actualy trying to accomplish, but they didn’t distrupt the event for long enough. All they accomplished is to show what kind of people you’ll be dealing with if you join LKD. Well done!
Is open source way of development efficient3? I don’t know. This very interesting seminar topic, and appereantly very interesting research, was murdered with lots and lots of details on research methodology and details on the particular data sample used. If more time was spent on the findings and observations, this talk could be much more interesting and informative for the audience. I think the conclusion was that the OSS way is more efficient.. no, no, it wasn’t.. or was it? 
Can Burak Çilingir gave a nice workshop on Django. He first explained all the key concepts and then we did some coding. Even though we couldn’t create a working app, It was gentle introduction to Django. There certainly is a need for more Django developers.
I have been wanting to learn RoR for a long time. But I just wasn’t able to wrap my head around Ruby. After Erek Göktürk’s presentation I now, at least, have a rough understanding. Special thanks for his patience with my repetitive questions about blocks. I should learn Rails, and Ruby, better. I believe there are lessons to learn from Rails.
This seminar was the only one emphasizing hacker culture over software freedom. Jonathan Conradt of Google Chrome talked about the history of hackers and then the history of Google, Chrome’s implementation and vision and a little bit about Google’s vision. How “silly fast” Chrome is and will be.
The questions phase was a disaster though. Almost all the questions were aimed at Google’s don’t be evil motto, in the form of “you say you are not evil, but you do x and you do y“. One question was “why did Google buy a fighter airplane?“. Another one was “isn’t that creating a monopoly to require a Google ID for Android phones?“. Yeah, to get a Google ID you need to sign with your blood. But the dumbest question was “so you are collecting all these personal information. Do you share them with NSA?“. Do you guys really think all that SPAM you are getting is the result of harvesing e-mails from public websites? Wisen up a little bit please.
I wouldn’t be surprised, with this kind of treatment, if Google never ever EVER sends a representative again. Should we have kissed Google’s ass. No, that’s equally low. But trying to play I’m going to take you down with my questions is at the very least hostile. I have even heard one guy saying “oh, he didn’t take my question because he must have sensed that I’ll ask a difficult one“. We all witnessed someone else complaining the government to a representative of a foreign company for developing IE only websites.
This one, by Koray Löker, was by far the best seminar for me. The name of the presentation is actually something like; An Elegant Pass from Free Software to Culture Industry: Copyleft. He was well prepared, the topic was interesing and the rhythm of the presentation was almost perfect. If I was able to pick one session to recommend, this would be it.
Sometimes you need to step away, and even step out of your problem to gain a better understanding of it. Investigating open source movies4 may give us insights about sharing, freedom and, most importantly, originality aspects of open source software. Brilliant idea.
Freedays is the only major event for free software community in Türkiye. I would like to thank everybody for their selfless efforts and the sponsors for making it possible.
Hope to see you there next year.
1: This year two events, Freedays of Bilgi University and Linux and Free Softare Festival of LDK, are merged.
2: Few in number, short in content. Mostly a few words per slide. I hate presentations with 1000 slides and 100 words per slide.
3: Compared to conventional development methods used for propriety software.
4: Such as Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny.
I received the following e-mail today:
gençlerin türkçe bilgiye ihtiyacı var. türkçe yazsanıza!
Translation: Young people need Turkish articles. Why don’t you write in Turkish!
Let’s ask this as a question, or a more relevant question of why I am writing my blog in English, at the end of this post.
I am always shopping for new blogs for my RSS reader. Especially blogs written in Turkish. Not only because of Turkish is my mother tongue. But mainly because there are so few, you have to keep searching all the time. So far I’ve followed many blogs only to find out they’re by far and large not for me. Except for FZ Blogs of course, FZ rocks.
Then I’ve found this other blog, with FZ’s suggestion. It is in Turkish, check! tech/internet/programming related, check! Then I subscribed it happily. An article published today led to that e-mail in the beginning. It looked like an innocent article about Google Ventures until the final part.
Bir takım ahmakların dayattıkları genel fikir, halihazırda yurtdışında mevcut bir sistemi ne kadar çabuk kopyalayarak bir “.com” şirketi açarsanız o kadar başarılı olabileceğiniz yönünde. Bu senaryoda ileri teknoloji kullanımı, yaratıcılık, tasarım, özgünlük gibi unsurlar geri plana atılmış durumda.
Translation: Some fools are spreading the idea that the quicker you can duplicate an existing dotcom business the more successful you become. Advanced technologies, creativity, design and originality are neglected in this scenario.
Belli başlı, az sayıda ve sistemin çarpıklığından palazlanmış büyük oyuncu, etraflarına bazı çığırtkan ve spekülatif insanları toplayarak, kendi aralarında bir birlik oluşturmuşlar ve kendi aralarındaki rekabete rağmen, dışardan oyuna katılmak isteyenlere karşı düşmanca ve dışlayıcı bir tavır içindeler. Aslında bu primitif bir oyun, sektör var, oyuncular ve oyuncu olmayanlar var, oyuncular oyuna yeni oyuncu girmesini engellemek için işbirliği yaparken kendi aralarında da rekabet ediyorlar. Durum kabaca bundan ibaret.
Translation: Some big players, who had grown rich out of deformities of the system, gathering speculators and barkers around, formed an alliance, despite competition amongst themselves, to cast newcomers out. This is actually a simple game, there is the industry, players and non players, players are competing with each other while they cooperate to obstruct new players. This is roughly the situation
Naturally I asked if they could back that claim up. Are big players really trying to crush new startups? How exactly are they doing that?
I got no response to that comment, no big surprise. Instead I received the e-mail I mentioned in the beginning. Why? Because we love throwing mud at successful and not-so-successful1. Of course there’s no such secret allience between big players of Internet industry in Türkiye. At the very most they are (naturaly) protecting their investment. This is neither illegal nor immoral. If you actually have anything to support you claim Mr Consultant I’d be happy to read. Otherwise you should just admit you were wrong and fix that post.
Just trying to move the conversation into private, shows that you have nothing meaningful to say about the evil secret cult of Internet companies. That’s not even an e-mail you have sent me. It is more like an IM message pasted in an e-mail composer.
gençlerin türkçe bilgiye ihtiyacı var. türkçe yazsanıza!
Why don’t we pay the minimum attention to aviod being a situation where we end up being wrong. And more importantly why do we still insist even after we realize we are wrong. Say, if you give crack/warez links in your blog and then claim the software/media in question is public domain. And then when presentented with link to its official site where it is being sold (ie. not abandonware) you are supposed to try to make fun of people who did the warning? This is why I don’t, I can’t follow any Turkish bloggers.
Justification of stealing is bad for the person and bad for the community. Same is true with needless feces throwing and flaming corporate hatred.
Mr Consultant, I liked your blog. I want to follow it, I want to refer it to my friends, I want to learn something from it. So, please put some effort in when writing. I also like your web application yazboz.com a lot. It may be another duplicate of a well known class of applications you were bashing in your post2. But I like it. And I hope it becomes a big success.
The young needs Turkish information sources, eh? No! The young need to drag his sorry ass and learn English first. And then he should go read something of substance. And then if he has some time to kill he can read my blog. I am not an expert or guru or anything like that. I don’t have a mission or inclination to educate the young.
Trying to translate all the knowledge (written in English) on the Internet is absurdly, disproportionally more work than individually learning English, that it is plain stupid to even think about suggesting it.
I am writing in English for the following reasons:
If, for some odd reason, a young person were to listen to my advice, I’d like to repeat; learn decent English. Especially if you are a programmer. Get a book, a real book not one of those educational materials, and read it. It’s simple as that. Or all you’ll will be have to read is Mr. Consultant’s blog.
EDIT:
Author of mentioned post removed the second quote, about Internet investors, along with my comment there.
1: …and we love pissing contests. Just reply a question with another question, try to find the weak spot. look, I can piss further!
2: See the first quote.
3: This is of course in context of this Blog; mainly programming and programmers.
Appereantly Google has acquired FeedBurner and planning to do some changes with it. So I’d like to remove that external dependency and stop using FeedBurner. Please check your feed URL:
Google has announced Chrome as its new open source web browser. Is the much rumoured Google OS? Or just giving back to the open source community as they state it. In any event I think it is good news.
They have a nice comic e-book highligthing the features of chrome. Here is a list of the features I find most interesting (and promising):
I am pretty content with the Firefox 3, its new full-screen mode and somewhat intelligent addressbar. It runs quite fast, crashes only once in a while (and almost all the time because of the stupid flash plugin). But Google’s web browser is still exciting news, I will be looking forward to its launch. Don’t forget to check out the presentation.
