Open source based committee in college

[ranger1021994]

I have started a committee in my college based in Mumbai,India.We wish to conduct seminars and workshops that promote the usage of FOSS.
I am hoping that someone here will be able to help us out by educating students about FOSS through seminars and workshops.
Interested members can PM me

[TheFu]

I have started a committee in my college based in Mumbai,India.We wish to conduct seminars and workshops that promote the usage of FOSS.
I am hoping that someone here will be able to help us out by educating students about FOSS through seminars and workshops.
Interested members can PM me

Having an online space so that interested people can find your group would be highly important. Don't forget to invite people from other colleges and universities too. Reach out to the CS professors and see if they might be willing to broadcast meeting announcements.

You may want to clarify if your focus will be on software development (F/LOSS languages) or end-user F/LOSS concerns. Each of those groups will bring in very different membership. Non-programmers will be extremely frustrated if python, php, ruby, perl and other F/LOSS languages are the primary topics. Manage expectations.

In the USA, using Meetup.com is popular for this sort of thing.

I'm an organizer for a LUG and we have partnered with a local university, but go out of our way to send invitations to other, "like-minded" groups. I'm always surprised at the number of people who do not discover our group via google, rather they find us through meetup.com. I guess there is an "app" for that? Every semester we have a "tell us what you want" meeting to organize what we will teach. That usually takes 30-45 minutes so we do a presentation on something Linux related (we are a LUG) too.

I'd also point out that many people do not understand the difference between F/LOSS, FLOSS, FOSS and OSS. That means you need to target all of these terms for SEO on your website. Our group used "FLOSS" and we had lots of dentists signing up.

Perhaps if you contact other F/LOSS organizations, they'd be able to offer better guidance? http://ossatlanta.org/

Be certain the membership has a good time!

[bc.haynes]

I have seen these acronyms used before (F/LOSS, FLOSS, FOSS and OSS), and I don't know what they mean. Will someone enlighten me?

[ddrichardson]

Free/Libre Open Source Software, Free Open Source Software and Open Source Software. Wikipedia covers this reasonably well here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software#FLOSS).

[TheFu]

Free/Libre Open Source Software, Free Open Source Software and Open Source Software. Wikipedia covers this reasonably well here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software#FLOSS).

OSS is not necessarily free. May need to pay to see it and usually cannot modify it. Look, but don't touch. I've worked at places where we bought source licenses to a number of libraries and even for a complete DBMS. Definitely NOT free.

FOSS may contain proprietary parts that limit what you can do in unexpected ways. Just because something is given away, don't mean any rights come with it to use as you like or modify the code. Sometimes "FOSS" is the same as "F/LOSS", but not always.

F/LOSS usually means GPL/LGPL/AGPL/BSD/MIT/Apache/Perl licenses which have their own limitations and might be called a "viral license" by some.

Don't forget the "Open Core" style licenses being pushed by larger commercial companies. The "core" of the product is F/LOSS (often), but not usually all that useful for more than trivial lab testing. No company of any size can really use it. There are exceptions, of course.

The AGPL was created to prevent companies from taking GPL software, modifying it, but never releasing their changes/improvements to the world. Google, Facebook, Twitter and TiVo are just a few companies built on GPL software in that manner. Most of the developers who I've met were just happy that someone got use from their code, but wouldn't it have been nice if 0.00001% of the profits made were returned to the GPL projects? My personal opinion is that if they follow the license, fine.

[ddrichardson]

I wasn't implying they were the same thing - just giving what the acronyms stood for.