Subscribe

Free session sources ideas

By Leigh-Ann Francis
Johannesburg, 01 Feb 2010

The open source philosophy of sharing of ideas and knowledge is revolutionising one industry at a time, according to Stefan Lesicnik, technical director at Linux System Dynamics.

Speaking at Obsidian Systems' first Free Beer session, hosted with media partner ITWeb, last week, Lesicnik discussed the idea of 'open everything', ranging from open medicine to open education.

On the financial front, Nicolaas Coetzee, solutions architect for FNB Connect, offered a glimpse into the bank's experience and achievements with open source deployments and development.

This was the first of a series of quarterly sessions to be run by open source evangelist Obsidian Systems, to serve as a platform for discussion around open source technology.

Noting that the industry has been lacking an event dedicated to open source development, Obsidian MD Muggie van Staden, says: “Linux user groups have been around for ages and the Linux Professional Associated died down years ago. We needed something more fun that combined technical and business discussion.

“Open source tends to be a lot about the technical but has grown heavily into business areas,” opines Van Staden. To this end, each session offers both strong technical and business speakers.

“Hopefully the Free Beer Sessions will become the forum where we get the guys realising the potential of open source,” he adds.

Calling CIOs

For the next event, Van Staden hopes to attract more CIOs, in order to spark a discussion between business and technology. “The techies see what they do one way, and the CIOs see what they do another way,” he explains.

“They come from different worlds and they want different things from technology. Hopefully we can get them around free beer and pizzas to share ideas about technology that will suit both worlds,” concludes Van Staden.

Share