Alexandre Trilla, PhD - Data Scientist |

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-- Thoughts on data analysis, software development and innovation management. Comments are welcome

X JPL

06-Jul-2011

Past Friday, July the 1st, I could enjoy the last day of the 10th Free Software Symposium (Jornades de Programari Lliure, JPL, in Catalan), which was held at UPC, Barcelona. In the morning, Prof. Arcadi Oliveres and Prof. Joan Tugores gave an overview of the economic and social impact of new technologies, trying to establish links with the free and proprietary software models. Prof. Oliveres overtly discussed that the lack of information that arrives from the non-independent mass media makes people live a lie. In the same line, Prof. Tugores generalised that the more uneven is a society, the fewer are the business/economic groups that share the power to make (big scale) decisions, and the more easily influenced they are to private (and sometimes dishonest) interests. That reminded me of the Builderberg Group altogether, and Uncle Ben with the often-quoted Spider-Man theme of "with great power comes great responsibility".

A debate followed to discuss the social, economic and political impact of free software. Among the many interesting topics that were treated, it surprised me an analogy of the Anonymous' deeds with a former hacker group named CCC (I didn't jot down what the acronym stands for, though), which revealed some sensitive information that the USSR had hidden and prevented the 4 reactors of the Chernobyl nuclear plant from beginning a fusion chain reaction. God bless those hackers! Similarly, the speakers raised the interest of monopolies in the spreading of software piracy, which is used as a "drug" to retain users. There was also a reference to some study that shows that piracy actually does not harm authors. So what's the fuss about piracy in the end? By the way, the SGAE has just been prosecuted for embezzlement of funds (see this and this).

In the afternoon, a series of technical presentations followed. Pere Urbon introduced NoSQL, which are unstructured DBMSs that relax the ACID properties. He pointed out their ability to scale horizontally and their ease of replicability and distribution, at the expense of weaker consistency. Next, Albert Astols presented the modus operandi of the KDE translator community, with all the details about the .pot files and their management. Marc Palol followed with cloud computing as the future new paradigm of FLOSS communities. He centred his speech around Hadoop (the free implementation of Google's MapReduce) as an example of distributed computing platform. Finally, Israel Ferrer talked about the greatnesses of Android wrt former mobile platforms like JavaME, but admitted its excessive fragmentation with so many official releases and the device manufacturer's own refinements. I did find the Intents (abstract descriptions of operations to be performed) ability very ingenious, though.