I had a talk and discussion with students and Open Source and Free Software supporters organized by LinuxNUS at the National University of Singapore this week. It really amazes me to see the high level of knowledge here about free and open source software and current developments and I am happy to say, that I learnt quite a bit myself from those students. Together we gained lots of ideas how we can cooperate closer in the future. I invited them to the OpenTechSummit and the LXDE Asian Summit which we are organizing as a partner from May 4-10 in Taipei and I am looking forward to get involved in more events with LinuxNUS in the future. LinuxNUS, thanks for your great work and organisation!
Fotos: GOH Lu Feng
Liveblogging by GOH Lu Feng: After talking about the business opportunities with LXDE, Mario is now talking about the community at LXDE. An interesting fact about LXDE Project is that the founder of the Project, alias PCMan, is actually a medical doctor! A very prominent member of the LXDE community is Klaus Knopper, also the creator of Knoppix LiveCD. In fact, the recent release of Knoppix has moved from having KDE to LXDE as the default desktop environment. One of the key messages from Mario is that an Open Source Project need both technical and non-technical members, as well as people with wide diversity in order for an Open Source Project to be successful. Mario also gave an anecdote of a student in Taiwan who actively contributed to LXDE. This student enjoyed development work and was netted an internship with the Open Source Foundry in Taiwan, due to his involvement and experience with Open Source Development. Mario also mentioned that he is able to get openSUSE to sponsor usb sticks if anyone is able to produce a light version of openSUSE with LXDE. To be updated: Details steps on how to contribute to the LXDE project and GSOC LXDE Projects. Todo: Help LXDE advertise abt GSOC to the Singapore Universities. (http://linuxnus.org/2009/03/11/live-blogging-at-lxde-talk-mar-09/)
We had dinner at Dover after the talk. The food was great and so was the company. Quite a few ideas popped out from the conversations. One suggestion from Mario was to organise some girl only events to attract girls into Open Source. This has been a successfully practiced in Taiwan. Another idea that is likely to be worked on is to organise FOSS.SG. (http://linuxnus.org/2009/03/12/lxde-talk-mar-09-aftermath/)
Mario Behling is a German born serial entrepreneur. He founded the lubuntu project, and as the co-founder of FOSSASIA he supports communities to develop open technologies for social change. Mario presently works on SUSI AI from his Singapore base.