Linux Day 2017 (Modena)
After a few years of vacation I did found the time and the will to participate again to the Linux Day in Modena, organized by the local Linux User Group known as Conoscere Linux. Due to personal time constraints, I was unable to see all the talks, and therefore here you can find some really small impressions about the event. And the summary is: I’m not impressed at all. Sorry to be so harsh! First of all, I have to say people at Conoscere Linux is doing a very good job, and the LUG is really active with a lot of courses and specific-subject evenings. I really appreciate the effort and good will, and I believe it is one of the most active LUG I’ve seen in last years. Another interesting point is that the LUG is actively involved in spreading the Open Source culture in high schools (pre-university), and this is an important topic. Despite the above, the Linux Day was lacking contents. As a participant to a Linux Day, I expect to learn something new about interesting projects, projects I never heard of, projects I’m going to download and try on my laptop. Or some good advocacy about Open Source. None of the above happened. In particular, the advocacy one was deprecable. The first talk was by professor Renzo Davoli, a well known person in the italian open source community. His talk was about advocating Open Source, but it was a real disaster and a mess of trivial old concepts about Open Source. Despite the not-so-fun lemon presentation (not joking) and the pomodoro-field joke, there was no point in attending such presentation, because it seemed to me the presentation itself did not have any real aim at all! Really, in 2017 do we still need to present Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and friend as bad guys? Do we still need to say that rich people is so rich because has stolen on Free Software? Do we still need to say that Stallman was a good guy and GNU/Linux is the operating system? What about all the other projects that are using more free licences such as BSD, Perl and so on? What about data ownership and the continuos data mining done by searching engines and e-commerce sites? If we insist in presenting Open Source as a religious debate, we are going to catch nothing more than blindly believers. Then there was a lightining talk about an enterpreneur presenting his own experience in collaborating with Microsoft. That was quite interesting, expcet that I would have expected him to present some way of comparing the experience in the Open Source world (or with Open Source tools). The last talk I attended was by Italo Vignoli, an important member (founder?) of the Libre Office project. The talk was more interesting than the previous two, since it reported some concrete problem in using non-open standards for documents and, mostnotably, reported some real number about the size (as lines and bytes) of the same document. After that I had to leave, so I don’t know how the day continued, but I know for sure people did a great job organizing labs. As a sidenote, I really still don’t see the point in Django girls and similar feminism activities: hacking is a culture, without a gender. If people continues to emphasize the need for de-genderizing it, we will remain dominated by a wrong gender culture.