Swarthmore College Department of Computer Science

Talk by Jason Dobies, Red Hat

Open Source Software: The Who, What, Where, When and Why
Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at Villanova
4:30 pm in the Mendel Science Center 154

The software industry is experiencing a major shift in mentality. A landscape that was once dominated by closed, proprietary systems is now rapidly being populated by software supporting open APIs and extensibility. Free, open source software components are being used in all domains, ranging from students to start up businesses to large scale enterprises. The typical stereotype is that open source software is written by an average geek in a garage. However, as developers begin to adopt the open source mentality, companies such as Red Hat and MySQL are achieving success in basing their revenue on an open source model. Even outside of these companies and their employees, many open source projects develop a vibrant community of voluntary contributors. This talk will focus on describing the open source movement and its beliefs. Included will be a look at both one established revenue model as well as first hand experience on migrating a closed source project into an open source community, using the JBoss Operations Network and its open source platform RHQ.

Biography: Jason Dobies graduated from Villanova in 2001, receiving the Blaise Pascal Medallion in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics. He went on to get a Master's in Software Engineering from Drexel University in 2007 with a concentration in User Interfaces. He is currently a full-time employee of Red Hat as a Senior Software Engineer on the Red Hat Network Satellite project along with its open source counterpart Spacewalk. Additionally, Jason is employed as an adjunct professor at Villanova, currently teaching Algorithms and Data Structures II.

Refreshments and conversation will be shared immediately after the Colloquium in MSC 159.