The first speaker was Jay Freeman, also known as Saurik, who is an important member of the free software community around the iPhone. He is the main developer of Cydia, a package manager for the iPhone, and Winterboard, an application that let you modify the appearance of your phone. Both run on jailbreaked phone. He mainly talked about Cydia and his effort to create an iPhone marketplace managed by the users as an alternative to Apple’s expensive marketplace. Saurik is a really intelligent person and an amazing programmer and his talk was really interesting. He used Veency, a VNC server he ported to the iPhone for his presentation so he could show us in real time on an iPhone what he was doing. He also gave a tutorial on Objective-C for the iPhone with an emphase on memory management that was interesting even if sometimes really complicated.

The next speaker was Jean-Michel Bouffard, a researcher at the Communications Research Center of Canada. His current project is called OpenMokast and is a really interesting one. The objective of the project is to build a cellphone that could take advantage of all the free data that flows over the air. With a lot of multimedia content being broadcasted over the air, this is an amazing idea. No need to go through your cellphone service provider to get video or audio. He integrated a usb antenna to the OpenMoko Freerunner and modified the Linux stack that runs the phone to capture de L-Band data. He can thus listen to the radio without having to pay any extra fees. OpenMoko is an amazing platform for this kind of project since not only is the software completly open source, but the hardware is also totally open with the design CAD files available. However, the platform is still not stable and he showed in his tutorial that it takes a lot of willpower to compile everything that is needed to write the most simple application.

The last speaker was Dilpreet Singh, one of the winner of the first Android Developer Challenge. He and his team designed the Life360 application, an Android application that allows you to track your family members and interact with them in different ways. He talked about the advantage of Android, the biggest being the fact that the platform is open, meaning that you have access to more features than with other platform like the iPhone’s platform. He also talked about the “Apache License catch” of the platform. This is, the software being under the Apache License, phone makers can decide to modify it, adding or deleting features, and add closed code. His tutorial was probably the more complete of the three speakers with a full walkthrough of how to write an Android application.

A pretty interesting panel discussion then followed. I won’t talk about it in details since a lot of different subjects have been discussed. For a video of the full discussion just follow this link.

So like I said, he was at the University yesterday. I had been waiting for this talk for while and it was totally worth it. Not necessarily in a good way though, but more on that later. The first part of his talk was about the Free Software Philosophy. For a program to be Free Software, you need four things.

You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, you must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult.)

You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee.

You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements.

And, following Stallman philosophy, this is the only ethical way of developing software. By not following these principles, proprietary software goes against the freedom of the user and is thus unethical. As such, every piece of software should be released using copyleft, so that nobody in particular owns the code and the four principles can be followed. There is a lot more about Free Software than that, but it can be summarized to that. For more information, you can visit the GNU website.

He then talked a bit about the history of the GNU Operating System. He started with the how and why of the creation of the movement which led him to the need for a kernel and Linus Torvald unwanted contribution to the movement. His main point for this section really was: the GNU Operating System is not Linux. It than changed to Open Source software is not Free Software and why Open Source is also bad. And this is were I disagree. Stallman is particularly stubborn in his beliefs and insist that software has to be free for freedom reasons and so Open Source is good only if it is open to respect the freedom of the user. The way I see Open Source software is in a pragmatic way, I see it as a better alternative. By opening the code, more people can have a look at it and improve it. It is also a way to share knowledge between developers. This way nobody has to redo something somebody already did. This is more Linus view on Open Source and Stallman is totally opposed to it. However, it is still interesting to hear about different ideas and I can’t say that Stallman talk was bad.

He finished his talk with two subtopics, Free Software and the software industry and Free Software and education. For the software industry, his theory is that there should be no software product. Every software being Free Software, developers would be hired by companies to adapt already existing software to their needs. The problem with this, is that it kills the software entertainment industry right away. How can developing a game be profitable when the code has to be released once finish? Also, companies, in order to reduce their costs, would probably use already existing software even if it is not totally adapted for them. And what about concurrent companies? On the other side, I agree with his position on software in education. Most schools use proprietary software and don’t talk about the alternatives. For example, in College, I followed a (compulsory) course that teaches how to use the Microsoft Office Suite. The problem with that is that it target Microsoft Office directly meaning that if I want to do my homework or put this knowledge to use at home or at work, I have to buy (or pirate) a Microsoft Office License. Children are raised with closed source software that they then have to buy which is ridiculous. Schools should at least teach something people something they can get without paying. And this is especially true for people following Computer Science classes. Studying Free Software code is one of the best way to learn how to program. However, most schools teach the use of closed source program and framework like .NET.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting talk. I learned a lot, especially on the GNU philosophy and the differences between Free Software and Open Source.

He talked about his experience as a student and as a software designer. I like his pragmatic way of thinking in which the code, or in other words, the actual product, is central to the software development process. He insisted on the fact that most big companies only care about the product being shipped and not the product being good. He also talked a bit about the QA process and the adoption, for the worst, of automatic processes to manage this part of the software development cycle citing Windows Vista as an example. He underlined some of the the dualities between the UNIX and the Windows way of programming as well as the West Coast and the East Coast way of managing and their effects on software quality. Finally, he talked about the importance of having good writing and communication skills to be able to share and be recognized for the work that you do. Something I can only agree with.

Overall it was a really interesting talk and if you have the chance to see him, don’t miss it, because it is totally worth it.