Week #7: FOSS History

Jeffery Russell (@jrtechs) - 11 October 2019

Hey Ritluggers,

This week we have a guest speaker giving a talk on the history of FOSS.

D. Joe Anderson (deejoe, deej0e, dzho etc) is currently a homemaker. One of the original members of Interlock Rochester, Rochester’s first hackerspace, Joe has been teaching the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development course (aka, HFOSS¹) since Fall 2015. Nearly as old as Unix, Joe began computing in the 8-bit micro era, when that was still a fringe personal pursuit, and just as the tenets of free software were being formulated. Of course, he knew nothing of this at the time. A student of many disciplines, educated in chemistry and math, he was continuing work in applied scientific computing just over the hill from Silicon Valley right around the time “open source” was first repurposed to sell free software to venture capitalists. He and Linus Torvalds drank in some of the same establishments, just never at the same time.

With any luck, his talk will give some hint as to how the histories of computing and so-called “intellectual property” law collided to form the free and open-source software movements.

¹ — IGME-582, add it to your Spring 2020 shopping cart!

Hope to see you all there!

  • Jeffery Russell (@jrtechs)

Event Details

Fri, Oct. 11, 2019
04:30pm - 06:00pm
GOL-2620 (Med. DB Lab)


Keep up to date: