Sessions & Workshops

This moderated panel will focus on the issues of doing business with Creative Commons, Free Software and Open Source licenses

This moderated panel will examine the future of the idea of intellectual property in a highly-networked digital world.

The panel will answer audience questions, as well as discussing their views on the issues. Key topics will include software licensing, piracy, fair use, freedom of speech, innovation and consumer rights.

In his role as Mozilla Foundation Ombudslizard, Zak Greant will present an overview of the Mozilla Foundation, ranging from its origins in the early 90's and its formation, to its current activities and its goals for the future. (In a perfect world, Brian will present with me.)

Free Software and Open Source are widely misunderstood, not because they are new phenomenon, but instead because many people haven't recognized them as part of the continuous evolution of communication.

A practical session that teaches programmers and creators how to build their careers using FLOSS licensing and FLOSS projects.

A practical session that teaches businesses the fundamental principles of using, creating, modifying and selling FLOSS.

A case study from eZ Systems and how they have evolved a 100 % open source, but still scalable business model for a software application.

eZ Systems is today the worlds largest open source content management software company with about 85 employees. The company was founded in 1999 on a vision; a 100% open source software company making software helping people share their information.

The problem however was that at that time there were no known scalable business models based on open source that fit an application company. While selling services is an obvious part of an open source business model, how to scale it into a software company was not. Especially if you were not to make any compromises to the core vision of making it 100 % open source.

This talk takes you through the experiences of eZ, from the vision and philosophy through the challenges and success stories to the current enterprise open source model.

In his talk, Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) will analyse the impact of Open Standards on software and in particular freedom of competition in the software industry. Formats and protocols play a crucial role in the monopolization of markets and spreading of such monopolies. Based on the experience of FSFE in the area, including the Microsoft antitrust case where FSFE works with Samba to maintain freedom of competition in the workgroup server market, Mr Greve will explore the way in which standards can break these mechanisms and how Open Standards would have to be defined to ensure this.

I plan to speak about the roll of open source software in government. I'll recount my experiences in getting open source adopted for writing government software. I'll cover what is good about open source in government as well as some of the mistakes that many people (including myself) make about open source software in government.
I will discuss what I've come to believe are the central tenants of good government technology; namely open source, open data and open services. I've given a similar presentation several times in a variety of different contexts.
Generally, I speak for at least 30 minutes and do Q&A for at least 15 minutes.

Open source software represents one of humanity's first true globally participatory movements. Military, political, and social movements have had a vast reach, but even some parts of the world escaped the ravages of world wars or ignored the spread of socialist, communist, and capitalist economic ideals. Open source software is being written in places to which global conflict or changes in social or economic structures are rare. It's an ideal, a process, a culture, and, when it works, an unbeatable product given to humanity for free.

That's enormous. And trying to figure out how the pieces fit together, what it produces, and what to do with it is a very difficult undertaking. At the close of eLiberatica there will be a round table discussion of free software ideals, goals, methodologies, and benefits. These two talks will provide a 30K meter view of this landscape.

The first day's talk will focus, given the speaker's familiarity of the subject, on how the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux is put together from pieces of open source software; from the world at large, the Debian distribution and the Ubuntu community. A mechanical but non-technical look at how pieces of code from all over the world come together into a coherent whole.

The second day's talk will address why commercial software dependence is a flawed strategy, and how Romania can invest in Romania, and not have to depend upon the benefaction of yet another foreign power. As on the first day, there will be emphasis on how Romanian desktop operating system independence could be achieved with Ubuntu. Not theory, but both technical and non-technical tasks that could be undertaken now at little or no cost that would be significant steps to software freedom.

If you are new to open source you will hopefully leave with a better idea of what it is, what it's about, and how it comes together. And you'll be ready for the round table discussion. If you are familiar with the concepts and workings of the open source world you may get a different viewpoint, or an insight into a new area. Those interested in how the Ubuntu distribution is created and could be used both for Romania's benefit and profits are especially encouraged to attend.

A The business models related to open source software are going to displace closed source models more and more. This paradigm shift offers new opportunities for countries like Romania to enter the market without the barrier of big financial investments. Actually many Romanian IT-companies already concentrate on selling their workforce and not on selling software. Therefore the switch to a service oriented open source company could even be more painless then for a German software shop.

This presentation tries to show the opportunities for companies as well as for the individual IT-expert. The area of Enterprise-Resource-Planning Software deals as a concrete example. After an overview about the current status of available Open Source ERP-projects, different scenarios of participation will be presented.

We will present the history of the events which finalized with the born of ROSI Group and finally with eLiberatica Conference. Will introduce you all the people who helped with this initiative and will prove why in the FLOSS world (and in general), the small things you can do can have deep impact if shared with the community. (In a perfect world, Zak will present with me.)

The presentation abstract will be published soon.

The presentation abstract will be published soon.

Will present a brief history of the Apache project: how it started, how it works and peer production, key organizational choices, avoid relying on just one key person, consensus-based decision making.
Will discuss experiences with the Mozilla Foundation and compare to Apache.
Will discuss experiences with Subversion, how a company can still take a community-centric approach to development in contrast with companies that maintain a very proprietary hold on their "Open Source" software.
Finally will discuss the economic opportunities around Open Source.

We will present a few legal issues important to be understood for open licenses.
The first part of the presentation will talk about click-wrap contracts and how the Romanian legislation needs to be interpreted in order to allow that.
The second part will present the obstacles in the Romanian legislation for open source software developers and the way the open-source community can participate and influence the copyright-related debates.
The latter part of the presentation will focus on the necessity of open licenses for other types of works besides software and a brief overview of the Creative Commons project.

The actual Web (named "Web 2.0") represents just a transition from the old methods and practices to much more flexible and appealing ones: rich multimedia content, complex interactions, syndication, public and almost ubiquitous Web services, and many more. Multiple heterogeneous, dispersed and – sometimes – volatile resources are available, among others, to be published, consumed, mashed-up, and (re)produced on the Web.

We will discuss the key issues regarding these activities and we will present the most interesting Semantic Web-based technologies that can be used to enhance the user experience and to support complex service-oriented applications – so-called "semantic XHTML", microformats, resource tagging, semantic blogs/wikis, etc.

In middle of IP communication era, it is remarkable how Open Source applications shaped the evolution of Voice over IP. It is well know the role and spread of Asterisk PBX and OpenSER/SER in building VoIP networks and business.

The presentation will focus on underlining the benefits of using open source application to build complete VoIP platforms, in offering rich communication services -- how one can build an Open Source Telco. The speech will touch security and scalability aspects, exemplifying with successful Open Source VoIP deployments.

The Computer Forensic is becoming more and more important in the era when the Internet is also known as "the place where bad things happen".
Computer Forensic is trying to help to get an answer to the question "when/how/why" happened. Open Source tools can be used with success along this process of getting more evidences.

The first part of the presentation will cover the Computer Forensic process and will answer to the question why Open Source is a real alternative for this type of examination.
The second part will be about the Open Source tools and resources that can be used to conduct this kind of examination and the legal implication of using Open Source tool in the process of evidence acquisition and examination.

Triana Workflow Environment (www.trianacode.org/) was created as an Open-Source scientific environment, and more than 500 applications have been further developed based on Triana in support to scientific groups around the world, for example in: radio astronomy, astrophysical simulations, galaxy visualization, gravitational wave analysis, data mining, biodiversity problems, grid-enabled medical simulations, environmental science.
Triana environment is used for problem solving and orchestrating flows of operations/services. Workflow is implicit in scientific algorithms that specify a series of inter-dependent operations to be executed, to connecting such algorithms in a series of derivations, which when aggregated perform some higher-level task.
Based on Triana multimodal workflows, the Alchemist Infrastructure was further designed, to provide for a new paradigm in search and discovery of distributed resources. More recently, we have approached the application of Triana and the Alchemist in the field of Biomedical research, in support for biomedical image and spectral data discovery, the initial use-case being the utilization in Diabetic Retinopathy research and clinical trials.

Under the framework of the IOSSPL Project (www.iosspl.org), we developed the open-source software for library automation – IBLA Soft – based on the merging of advanced emerging technologies for enterprise applications.
We produced a high quality, low total cost of ownership solution that can meet the needs of most small and medium-size public libraries. We used an open-source portal framework based on standard J2EE enterprise technology, and independent portlets (JSR 168 standard-compliant) were published in the framework – the library, community, and administration portlets.
The IOSSPL Project is an R&D project developed in collaboration by Romania and Italy. The open-source product was implemented in several pilot libraries (with hierarchical interconnections) in Romania, and it is further offered free of charge to all the libraries in Romania that expressed their interest to use the system (public, educational, ONG and community libraries).

Wisdom of the crowds (cf. Wisdom of the Crowds – James Surowiecki), stirred by an ingredient called passion, can generate an economically viable model of innovating and doing things.
However, there are voices which argue that collective innovation is only group-thinking that reaches its own limits.

The presentation will cover and make a point over the following aspects: a) open source is not a new idea, rather the history repeats; b) a good Samaritan attitude or the only thing to do? c) meeting the conditions for collective innovation to work; d) the enemies from within.

We will present a method to build Ethernet cryptors based on bridging technology between an Ethernet physical interface and an crypted TAP or TUN interface over other interface of Linux system (usual an other Ethernet interface).
The cryptor can be used to interconnect LANs of PCs that process classified information (red) over unsecure links (black). Cryptors are easy manageable and the keys management is possible to made via HTTP interface.

OER ( Open Educational Resources ) and FLOSS movements are complementary. Both FLOSS and OER share a common conviction that access to resources, whether software code or learning materials, should be free and open for use, modification and sharing.
The newly developing field of OER should learn valuable lessons from the mature FLOSS.
Some of these lessons will be presented together with important OER projects developed in Europe and worldwide.
How students, teachers, and education in general could benefit of these projects will be underline.

The presenter will speak also about some courses and projects in which she is involved and which prepare students and teachers to use OER and to participate in OER communities, especially using Web 2.0 collaborative technologies such as RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, collaborative bookmarking systems and social systems.