After completing Google Summer of Code, I submitted a lightning talk about my work at the Nextcloud Conference 2019. Moreover, I asked to participate to the volunteers team along with my mentors, Pantelis and Stathis.
It was the first time I attended a conference abroad and the first time I ever visited Berlin. It was a unique experience from which I gained a lot and I feel grateful that Nextcloud sponsored me to join the conference.
Let me share this one of a kind experience with you and hopefully inspire more people to join the Nextcloud community and attend the following Nextcloud conferences!
Eirini, Stathis, Pantelis and me, all Greeks, all volunteers, visited the TU Berlin to help set up the main hacking room, in any way each of us was capable of. Tables, chairs, drinks, signs, registration bags, badges etc. All set for the big registration day. This is when we first met Jos and Marinela, who welcomed us, showed us how to organize the place and helped us with our tasks. Thank you both! đ
As time passed, more and more Nextclouders arrived at TU Berlin. One of the parts I enjoyed most during this trip, was meeting all these awesome people, who made the newcomers like me feel like home and with whom we had some constructive conversations, technical or not, and had a great time đ I have to admit, Iâm inspired by them and I want to contribute to Nextcloud now more than ever!
Conference day 1 has come and all volunteers are on their shifts, exhibitors at their booths, speakers getting ready and TU Berlin is getting crowded by early in the morning.
Frank Karlitschek (CEO of Nextcloud) opened the conference presenting Nextcloud 17 and the new features coming with it. The shiny new features were pretty impressive, like Remote Wipe which allows users and administrators to forcibly clean files from remote devices (e.g. in case they are stolen) or the two-factor authentication improvements about the first login and new administrator settings, regarding lost or broken second factor solution and delegating the ability to create one-time-login tokens to group administrators. Moreover, some big achievements were announced. One of them is a doubling of Nextcloud security bug bounties to USD 10.000, which means weâre talking about a solid and reliable product. Another announcement that got me, was the collaboration with IBM. Nextcloud 17 introduces IBM Spectrum Scale integration, a high-performance file system, which results in several benefits in the area of performance, scalability and storage integration. You can read more about the new features here.
Later that day, among the lightning talks, I had my 5min presentation about my work on GSoC project âExpanding NextCloudPiâ, which you can read here (or watch the video at 5:31:06).
Some of the talks that stood out for me were âThe Not-so-secret futureâ of the American activist for Freedom of Expression, Jilian York as well as the lightning talk of the investigative reporter Fredrik Laurin about âThe Investigative Cloudâ.
A party followed at the Tiergarten where we ate some Berlin dishes and had fun getting to know new people.
Conference day 2 was as interesting as day 1, but except for the technical talks, we listened to some talks that really broadens oneâs horizons like the keynote by Renata Avila or Thomas Lohningerâs talk âStand up and act!â. Both of these talks were breathtaking and inspiring.
At the end, Frank and Jos thanked the volunteers and the conference was officially over.
The rest of the days, a Hack Week took place at the lounge where Nextcloud employees, along with everyone who was willing to hack, shared ideas about Nextcloud and worked together on projects.
As for Berlin, we did have some free time to go for sightseeing and visit some museums. We visited some of the mainstream attractions like the Brandenburg Gate or East Side Gallery, but we had also the chance to visit some alternative places like C-Base, where our friend Marie gave us a tour, or Teufelsberg, where we did some hiking into the woods carrying laptops with us â who said software engineers canât do that? đ
Greek dream team: Stathis, Fani, Pantelis, Eirini
Again, I want to thank Nextcloud and all of the team for this unique experience!
This blog post holds a special place in my heart, as I wrote it for LaceWing Tech and it was originally published at our blog. It was a contribution I made to support the company in Corona times. So this post brings back memories from that awesome team and an one of a kind company where it was my honour to work.
Open Source software follows a fundamental rule: code is publicly accessible and freely distributed to be used or modified by anyone.
If youâre making your first steps into the Open Source world, you may think that youâve never used Open Source software before. The truth is that Open Source is all around us, and sometimes youâre using it without even realizing it. For example, do you use Firefox or Chrome as your browser? If so, you are using software from popular open source projects.
Who benefits from Open Source?
Open Source offers different benefits, depending on the perspective from which you look at it. An individual user benefits from it directly every day while using it. In general, the adaption of Open Source has a positive impact on the quality and the development of technology itself, too. Also, when you look at the whole picture, society benefits from it in a special way â and this might be the most important benefit that Open Source offers.
Why you should use Open Source software
If you are wondering how you as an individual could benefit from using Open Source software instead of a Closed Source alternative, youâre headed in the right direction. Everybody starts with that thought the first time they get involved with Open Source.
Itâs free and yet powerful
Closed Source software is often believed to be superior to Open Source alternatives, because of the money you invest in order to use it. This is a myth. Just because you donât pay for it, it does not mean that Open Source software has less features. On the contrary, people are contributing to Open Source projects because they need to use their software, so they do their best to make it functional and feature-rich.
Modify according to your taste
A company that produces a Closed Source product invests a lot of money to keep their clients happy. This means that the software is developed to satisfy their clientsâ needs and their needs only. Most of the times, these clients are companies that are buying big enterprise edition installations. So, when youâre using your personal Closed Source software installation there may be features that you donât like â but there´s not much you can do about it. In the open source world, if you donât like something, you can change it so that it fits your needs.
âDo I have to know how to code in order to do it?â
Not necessarily! If youâre into coding then you can change whatever you donât like on your own. However, thatâs not the only way to trigger a change. Keep in mind that almost every open source project has a community where people make code contributions and are willing to help others contribute too. A contribution is not restricted to coding. Youâre more than welcome to report a bug or request a new feature and itâs very likely that others will help you implement it.
How does Open Source improve technology?
General technology enhancement
When a group of people use an Open Source software every day and test it to its limits, they discover bugs and come up with new feature ideas. They will contribute code to fix the bugs and the community will embrace and include it in the upcoming release.
âDoes that mean that the software itself is the only one who wins?â
No! All technology in general advances, because when people from several communities work together and distribute code, great achievements are made and they are not restricted to one softwareâs code. New ideas are born publicly, recycled and integrated by other projects. Itâs not a contribution to a single software or a company, itâs a contribution to technology as a whole. One great example of that is Security. When there is a security hole in the code of a project and one team finds it, another project could detect the same hole on their project and use the same piece of code to fix it. That means that security in general is enhanced, which is a good thing overall.
Code is company independent
Another benefit of Open Source is the decoupling of software from a single company. When a software is supported explicitly by one company, and the company goes out of business, then so too does the software. Thatâs not the case with open source. If a company that produces an Open Source software goes out of business, the code can be still used by others and if the license allows it, another company or community can take over and continue supporting the project. Open Source software is not bound to one single company; rather, it is free technology to be used and extended by anyone.
How society benefits from Open Source
In addition to the practical benefits that Open Source offers to individuals and technology, some political benefits arise from its philosophy.
Equal opportunities
Itâs a fact that not everybody has equal privileges in many aspects of life, including technology and information. Open Source makes a huge step towards the revolution we need in order to achieve social justice, by offering people free access to technology . It narrows the social inequalities gap, as far as technology is concerned .
When software or hardware (yes, there is open source hardware, too) is distributed equally to people, then weâre one step closer to having equal opportunities to learning and getting familiar with tech tools and therefore, equal opportunities to education, employment and so on.
Public goods systems should use public code
Another way that society could benefit from Open Source is transparency and fair distribution of public goods. That could be achieved by using Open Source software in all public systems . A democratic society should demand public code in every public system so that people know how their data is used/processed.
Also, using Open Source software could also result in improving a public system. For example, the public health system could be improved by using Open Source software so that health professionals and authorities share their experience with each other and knowledge is distributed to everybody, and not only institutions with more resources than others.
Conclusion
From whichever perspective that you look at it, Open Source is important. It helps people, it improves technology and last but not least, it provides some humanitarian benefits. All it takes is that more people use it, because they are the lifeblood of Open Source.
“This report explores the unique nature of the community that builds and maintains free and open-source software (FOSS) and the role that community takes in shaping an open Internet. It draws on interviews with contributors to FOSS projects to highlight the communityâs strengths as well as its challenges."
FOSDEM 2020
15 February 2020
Iâve always been hearing stories about this open source fiesta called FOSDEM, but I never had the chance to attend to. This year, Nextcloud made that dream come true. Thank you Nextcloud for sponsoring me to this unique experience!
FOSDEM conference takes place at Brussels and it lasts for 2 days. However, the whole week in town is full of numerous open source events. I would be staying for 4 days, to attend some events and do some sightseeing since it was the first time I visited Brussels. So… Luggage ready, camera ready, open source mode on and weâre off!
I travelled along with my friend Stathis, and arriving at FOSDEM we met the rest of the Nextclouders. We were both glad to see again people we knew - Frank, Jos, Marinela, Greta - but we also made some new acquaintances - Bjoern, Silva, Borris. Altogether, we helped at the booth, talking to people about Nextcloud, introducing it to people that have never heard of it, spreading the word about Nextcloud Hub and helping others resolve any issues they had. And of course, handing out stickers generously!
The booth this year had grown bigger - that explains why Nextcloud was the only organization to have two tables đ And a cool blue light on the background!
Nextcloud shared the booth with DAVx5 and ONLYOFFICE. It was a pleasure sharing the booth with these awesome people and Iâm very happy I got to know them! Open source is literally connecting people
Both days, FOSDEM was quite crowded and weâve talked to an amazingly large amount of people. As of the talks, I attended a few - containers related topics - but the rooms were overcrowded and sound didnât work too well because of that. For me, FOSDEM was more about networking and getting to know people from open source community. And of course, collecting some stickers!
If you feel like seeing some Fosdem Faces to get the feeling, take a look at this album. The photographer got my face too
One of the events we visited on our trip was that of FSFE. It was pretty interesting to listen to people from different countries talking about their way of promoting open source technologies to their country. Thatâs where we met Izabel and Luis. My âmost important peopleâ from this trip
Stathis, Me, Izabel, Luis on our way to Delirium
Izabel is one of Stathisâs friends from OpenSUSE community and Luis, is the founder of GNUHealth project. GNUHealth was the first Free Software project that clearly focused on Public Health and Social Medicine. Rumor has it that Luisâ experience in rural and underprivileged areas in South America led him to start thinking on how Free Software could help health professionals and authorities to improve the public health system. Thatâs how he created GNUHealth, a “Social Project with some technology behind” as he defines it in [this talk](<https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/free-software-as-a-catalyst-for-liberation-social-justice-and-social-medicine/). For me Luis, is exactly the type of person the world needs most. I was so impressed by his story and his project and I definitely want to find a way to contribute to it in the future.
Back to Brussels, along with these people we headed to Delirium to get a beer with some OpenSUSE friends.
Since I stayed a bit longer in Brussels I had some time to walk around town, do some sightseeing and meet old friends. The most popular spots in the city is the Grand-Place square and the view from Mont des Art. As of attractions, a must-see is definitely Atomium and maybe these well known pissing statues (Manneken Pis, Jaeneken pis, Zinneke Pis). But if you ever visit Brussels, I suggest you take a quick tour around and then visit the cities nearby, like Gent or Bruges. And donât forget to taste some fries and waffles!
Until next time, enjoy some photos of the city đ
