Software Freedom and Linux Days 2016 Turkey

Posted by: Emin Mastizada 8 years ago

Software Freedom and Linux Days is one of biggest events in Turkey on Software Freedom and is Organised by Linux User Group Turkey (LUG) and Bilgi University every year starting from 2003. Its place where local users can gain knowledge about Free Software solutions from programming languages to applications, companies giving technical support for them and of course what is Free Software Philosophy and why its crucial to support this movement.

Today, when we know how big goverment surveillance is, the need in software freedom increases. As free softwares are mostly driven by community, there is mostly no chance of backdoors or any other dainger. Its the only way to save our privacy.

There were a lot of interesting talks during the event and awesome stands where people could learn new things and ask their questions to people who work on this field for a long time - "professionals". Here are few of them:

Barış Büyükakyol: Team member of Hackerspace Istanbul told about Software Freedom Philosophy. Also he told about wrong usage of some words like open source instead of free software, PC instead of WC (Windows Computer) and etc.

Ege Orhan: What is CopyLeft and can it be used in Turkey.

Aydan Taşdemir: How to make PostgreSQL backups using Pgbarman.

Sadık Faruk Çetin: Git - version control system.

Doruk Fişek: Big Data and NoSQL

Güray Yıldırım: ITU Software Freedom community member told about How to make desktop, mobile and IoT applications using Python/Kivy Framework.

Uğurcan Ergün: Self-Hosting for lazy people - YunoHost

Serdar Doğruyol: Crystal Programming Language

Halil Kaya, Fatih Kadır Akın: Hackathons in Turkey and Free (as in Freedom) Hackathons. The number of hackathons in Turkey is increasing very fast, but most of them are actually marathons inside of company where they try to get new ideas and applications from public for their own usage. But instead hackathons should gain something for public community. They demonstrated Packathon as an example for that where people could develop free packages without having to use some companies ideas and providing business plan for their hack (in some of Hackathons, jury members asks you about your business plan, which is not a purpose of a hackathon).

And of course, awesome stands where people meet each other and discuss their ideas and problems. LKD (Linux User Group Turkey) with awesome stickers, "Özgür Yazılım A.Ş." and Kartaca - companies in Turkey which give corporate support for Free Software Projects, and our stand, Mozilla.

Last time, 3 years ago in 2013 Mozilla had stand in SFLD with Selim Sumlu and Brian King. This year we demonstrated Mozilla projects like Thimble for HTML education, Memory optimized Rust Language, In-place localization tool Pontoon and Turkish Localized products of Mozilla (homepage, mdn, sumo, firefox, hello and etc.). Also we talked about importance of using SSL to save users' private details like passwords and how to get free SSL Certificate for Personal Sites using Let's Encrypt.

We had interesting discussions with users about different Mozilla products and actions (SmartOn and similar projects). Also some of attenders voluntered for localizing thimble project and we enabled it after the event.

Thanks for everyone who attended our stand and special thanks to Selim Sumlu, Baris Buyukakyol and Adil Oztaser for their help in stand.

As always Firefox mentioned mostly in all talks where privacy involved. And our new contributor Aybuke Ozdemir told about her contributions at Mozilla and how anyone can start contributing to Mozilla projects. There team, Kripton had significant impact in LibreOffice project.

For more information:

http://ozguryazilimgunleri.org.tr/2016/

http://www.lkd.org.tr/en/