Hey All,
After a discussion in #oclug on OFTC, I was inspired to write up a post
on reddit & lemmy about connecting FOSS developers in Ottawa. I'm
linking it here in case anyone else is interested. I've included the
whole body of the post in the email as well.
*
https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/1r4qpep/any_foss_developers_in_ottawa_or_wannabe_foss
* https://lemmy.ca/post/60437988
So I’ve been following some FOSS/linux software groups around the
world
like GPUL in Galicia and Chaos Computer Club & Modal Collective in
Germany and I’m a little jealous of what they’ve been able to build
in
their associated cities/regions. For example GPUL is organizing
GUADEC
(The GNOME community’s annual conference) this year in A Coruña, and
they regularly run workshops to get people into FOSS software
development at their local university UDC. They’ve also organized
(or
helped organize) previous events like XDC (The X.Org developers
conference for wayland/x11/mesa and related technologies).
Likewise the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) promotes open source software
and runs similar events including the annual Chaos Communication
Conference. What they put together seems like a great "CS Club" but
outside of a university and open to the public. The Modal Collective
in
Berlin hosts a regular (every 3-4 months) un-conference + hackathon
event (called Boiling the Ocean) working on a few different open
source
projects like GNOME, Postmarket OS & p2panda.
I'd love for something similar to exist in Ottawa. I've followed
some
groups here like OCLUG (Ottawa-Canada Linux user group), and Ottawa
Systems (https://ottawasystems.xyz/) and they meet some similar
goals
but not exactly what I'm thinking. (I have some notes below on those
events)
To me it would be awesome if we could have something like the
Boiling
the Ocean events in Ottawa. A semi regular event where there is
presentations about FOSS tech and a hackathon to contribute to the
related projects. I'd love to know if there are more people in
Ottawa
that would be interested in similar events. Perhaps if there is
enough
of us we can try to organize something. Ideally there are some
people
in Ottawa already familiar with some of these technologies. I spoke
with some of the organizers of Boiling the Ocean and they told me
the
original group started with ~5 people who were already GNOME, PMOS,
and
Linux contributors but now they have a regular group of ~15-20
people.
For some additional context, I professional work on Mesa3D
(https://mesa3d.org/) on a few different graphics drivers like
turnip,
anv, broadcom, lavapipe/llvmpipe. I would be happy to try and
introduce
people to working on graphics drivers (in fact I tried to do a
little
bit of that at Ottawa Systems with my own presentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohdT2ic39HA). I'd also like to learn
more about Linux kernel development, I'm really interested in the
new
"Mobile Linux" stuff like Postmarket OS. I think it would be fun to
work on getting Linux running on mobile phones and making the Mobile
Phone experience on Linux better. I'm also a regular GNOME user and
would be interested in contributing to some of the software I use
regularly.
Besides people who might be working on FOSS on their own I know we
have
a few companies (big or small) working on stuff that touches FOSS
like:
- Ciena runs Linux on a lot of their networking hardware
- QNX runs Linux on top of their hypervisor and have been
contributing
to the linux graphics stack to support virtualisation in this setup
- WindRiver has their own Linux distro
- Xilinx/AMD does linux work in Ottawa (I think mainly on the kernel
side for xilinx HW, not for AMD GPUs / CPUs)
- There is Credil (https://credil.org/) in Gatineau who seem to be
an
open source consultancy
- Shopify to my knowledge works on a few open source projects
related
to their frontend and backend
- like mentioned above we have people from Anubis and Mozilla in the
city
- Also from OCLUG know we have people from Redhat and Lenovo who
work
on Linux
Maybe you already work on FOSS, you work at one of these places, or
you
know someone who does he might also be interested in this idea :)
---
About the other groups: OCLUG from what I've seen focuses more on
the
Linux user side not really on the developer side. They also used to
be
a larger but seems to be shrinking now (from an outsiders
perspective).
The group runs a monthly meeting that centres around a presentation
and
discussion, typically on more Linux user like topics.
Ottawa Systems is a little closer to the other groups I've
mentioned,
running a semi-regular event. But its just presentations and its not
strictly focused on FOSS. The event has been great for meeting
people
in the developer community in Ottawa though, like I found out the
developer of Anubis (https://anubis.techaro.lol/) is from the Ottawa
region here, and we also have Mozilla developer here too!
I also saw hack613 runs some events at the maker space that could be
similar to what i'm suggesting here but the schedule seems pretty
sparse right now.
Perhaps there is some existing groups in the city that are closer to
what I'm thinking about.
Thanks & Regards,
Lucas
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