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The Philippine Open Source Summit will be held on June 23-24 at the Cebu International Convention Center in Mandaue City.
The summit aims to promote the integration of Open Source in order to assist businesses in adapting to the on-going globalization of the business world. It is source of innovation as it brings together people from different backgrounds and perspectives to work on and solve common business and IT problems. The Open Source Summit (OSS) is also an excellent approach for driving emerging standards and, in many cases; an open source project can become the common implementation of a standard that is used by a large number of IT vendors and customers.
Open Source is three main things - a way of developing software, a licensing approach which prioritizes the rights of users, and a community with open participation.
The first component of Open Source is a development methodology which uses a community approach to developing software, based around peer review. Since the code is openly published, everyone can see whether it is good or bad code - and offer feedback on how to improve it. This then promotes a meritocracy of developers - you get to be a key player by writing good code.
The next component of Open Source is the approach to licensing the software. Open Source is not freeware, shareware or unlicensed - it's just licensed in a different way to traditional commercial software. In formal terms, Open Source means that the license is one of about 60 licenses authorized by OSI - the Open Source Initiative (their logo is shown on the slide). Although there are many licenses, only a few, such as the GPL license used for Linux and the Apache license, are in broad use.
Finally, Open Source is all about open community - not just for developers, but for users and partners as well. Projects such as Linux, Apache and Eclipse offer a level playing field where anyone can participate, based on merit. These open communities are very different from vendor controlled communities like MySQL and JBoss where true open participation is prohibited.
According to James Velasquez, country general manager, IBM Philippines, "Open Source is a hot topic, both to the public and with many customers. It offers both potential benefits such as cost savings and flexibility, and potential challenges such as support and maturity."
"Customers are faced with the question - what should be our Open source Strategy? IBM is in a unique position to help them address their Open Source queries, because of our combination of open source and commercial software offerings, our involvement with Open Source going back over 7 years, and our experiences with Linux, Apache, Eclipse and many other open source projects," he adds.
IBM's Open Source approach has four goals: innovation, contribution, enhancement, and growth. The innovation goal is applied to the community approach where everyone's ideas are heard and applied. Contribution benefits all for one can be a contributor and a consumer of the technology that, in the end, develops a better product. Enhancement captures, focuses and translates open source innovation into a valuable asset for customers. Growth implies expansion of business opportunities that stems from new users and markets.
At the summit, IBM has delegated a panel of 3 speakers to discuss IBM's role in the integration of Open Source. Lope Doromal Jr., Chief Technologist - IBM Innovation Network, IBM Philippines will be discussing and providing an overview of how IBM plays into Open Source and the contributions made by IBM to Open Computing. He will also talk about how companies can integrate Open Source into the business and the things they need to consider in doing so. Alejandro Melchor III, Government Programs Executive, will introduce Service Sciences, Management and Engineering, a new academic discipline designed to produce "Adaptive Innovators" who can drive innovation in the burgeoning services-led economy. SSME is also a new research area designed to accelerate national competitivess in high growth niches of the global services economy, such as the global outsourcing and offshoring industry and IT services. Lastly, Terry Goldman, the Rational Technical Sales Manager and Software Systems Architect, will give a briefing on Service-Oriented Architectures, distributed development, cooperation of future development as well as the new innovative IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform that was built upon the open and extensible Jazz Technology Platform, the Rational Team Concert or RTC.
-- Tech Times Online
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