Free and Open Source Software: Reaching for the Stars
Date and Time
Wednesday, January 18, 2006 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Location
MIT Building E-51, Room 315
Presenters
Jon "maddog" Hall - jon.maddog.hall gmail com
Summary
Maddog talks about his travels around the world visiting Linux users.
Abstract
For more than a decade Jon "maddog" Hall has been traveling around the world talking about Free and Open Source Software. He has experienced software users from the island of Fiji to the depths of the Amazon rainforest to the depths of far behind what was the iron and bamboo curtain all using FOSS. Come here the stories of what these people were doing with it, why they chose it and why the things they did would simply have been impossible to do with closed source, proprietary software. Liberal use of his many photographs taken over the years will be applied to the talk.
Bio
Jon "maddog" Hall is the Board Chair of the Linux Professional Institute, Co-founder of Caninos Loucos, the President of Project Caua and the President of Linux International. Since 1969 Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, educator, author, CEO and consultant. Mr. Hall has worked for companies like Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, IBM, SGI and Futura Networks (Campus Party) as well as being a private consultant. Mr Hall worked on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994, when he first met Linus Torvalds and recognized the commercial importance of FOSS. Mr. Hall has taught at Hartford State Technical College, Merrimack College and Daniel Webster College. Mr. Hall is the author of many magazine and newspaper articles, many presentations and one book, "Linux for Dummies". He writes a monthly article for Linux Pro Magazine. Mr. Hall has consulted with the governments of China, Malaysia, Canada and Brazil as well as the UN and many local and state governments. Mr. Hall is on the advisory board of the University of Sao Paulo's Centro Interdisciplinar Em Tecnologias Interativas (CITI). Mr. Hall traveled to over 100 countries speaking on the benefits of FOSS. Mr. Hall received his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University (1973), and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York (1977).
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