When I think of free beer and open source software, one thing comes to mind: headaches. Of course, not everyone has this association, and at the Free Beer Sessions hosted by Obsidian Systems they try to change the perceptions that people like myself hold against purely open source solutions.
The Free Beer Sessions are held for the purposes of networking, knowledge sharing and the odd sales pitch. It’s more or less a geek valhallah: beards, ale quaffing and axe battles (of the intellectual kind).
The two presentations of the evening were given by Muggie van Staden of Obsidian Systems, who spoke about Professional Open Source Software (POSS) business models, and Jason Norwood-Young of 10Layer (a hired gun previously used by Flow), who spoke about cloud server infrastructures.
Flow Communications is not an outright software development company, and so Muggie’s presentation on the business side of open source software development wasn’t really pertinent to our core business. The presentation did give us some insight into the business side of products like ExpressionEngine (our content management system of choice) which, although a professional product developed and sold by EllisLab, has a software licence flexible enough to allow community development to take place.
Next up was Jason, who took us through a very practical explanation of how he scaled up the Mail & Guardian Online, from running on a traditional server setup to a multi-server, virtualised environment. All of this was interspersed with Jason having to deflect the criticisms of facetious geeks regarding his server architecture. All in all, it was quite entertaining and quite informative. The geeks of Flow now have a whole new understanding of where we might take our server architecture in the future.
Thus, the evening drew to a close and we took our inebriated selves home to sleep deeply and dream of cloud servers, hoping that tomorrow’s headaches would be only software-related.
If you like the idea of joining the next Free Beer Session, visit http://freebeer.linux.co.za to find out more.