Barcamp Yerevan 2017 kicked off on Sunday, May 27. This is 9th Barcamp in Yerevan and more than 3000 people signed to participate in the unconference. This year Barcamp had 6 foreign speakers and one of them was Jan Wildeboer from “Red Hat” software company wearing a red hat.
“When I started 12 years ago, people, my parents, my father actually told me, open-source – you are trying to make money with stuff that everyone can download for free, how crazy is that. I said, it is going to work, and my dad said, it is never going to work this is hippie stuff, communist, socialist stuff, don’t do that,” he said adding that his first customer was a big bank in Switzerland: “I was doing a demonstration of our technology for 6.5 hours. And after 6.5 hours, the CIO looked at me and said that is very impressive what you have shown us, we find that very interesting, but we have talked to the legal department, and they have told us that the open-source is a socialist and communist project and we cannot legally use it.”
Jan Wildeboer noted that a lot of people still think that open-source is something that people are doing in their spare time, or it is a staff for computer nerds: “No, it is not; it is completely running this world. This whole world, the modern world that we live in completely runs an open-source and free software. It is extremely relevant, and we should never forget that.”
He believes that open-source and open way of thinking has only started, and it is moving from software: “Every government now, I haven’t checked the Armenian Government for this, is now talking about open data, open knowledge, and sharing.”
Summarizing his talk, Jan Wildeboer said: What we have learned from last 10-15 years is that we can really change this world completely. 15 years ago, people were looking at companies like “Red Hat” and saying it is never going to work; you might become a little company and make a little money; that’s fine, but you will never become a big company. Now we have changed whole IT world; everybody is now looking at open-source. It is going to be the future for a very long time; this is not going away. And we are as radical as we always have been about this: everything we do in “Red Hat” must be open-source no exception.”
Ami CHICHAKYAN
