I had the pleasure of speaking to a crowd of young students of Mechanical Engineering about a little while ago at a University I have a good relationship with and it was thrilled to see their reaction to things that folks like me, that work with Open Source all day, take for granted.
It was great to see the curiosity of the attendees about the topic in general, the opportunities OSS may bring to their current career paths and how exciting it is to participate in a community without geographical borders.
While this particular event is a little outdated by now, it demonstrates that the ubiquitous presence of Free and Open Source Software in our everyday lives is mostly unnoticed and younger generations tend to become unaware of it, thus we definitely need to spread awareness.
The Place
The talk took place at the State University of MaranhĂŁo, known locally as UEMA, northeast of Brazil, more specifically at the campus of SĂŁo LuĂs, the state capital. Their undergraduate course in Mechanical Engineering is the oldest in the region, together with their undergraduate courses in Business and Agronomics, exists since the creation of the University in 1981, providing University education for free to students of a region that doesn’t have a vocation for technology.
Interestingly, IT and computing in general is a more recent area of focus for this institution, but my talk was directed to Mechanical Engineering students. There were brand new starters as well as veterans amongst the attendees.
The Talk
My aim of the talk was to raise awareness about the opportunities the Open Source Software ecosystem may provide for their career. I could not anticipate, though, their reactions when I demonstrated how Open Source Software remains invisible in the foundation of many pieces of technology they interact with. Faces surprised with ideas such as the amount of OSS libraries that power Andriod™ and iOS™ to Google Chrome™ to Microsoft Windows®.
Besides the boring part of definitions about what is Free, Open Source and proprietary software, the importance of the licenses and how those definitions started, conflicted and are now settling towards an interesting network of collaboration, we got into a very interesting business when I started to call their attention to the great OSS packages we have in the wild that can be of their interest as Mechanical Engineers. Projects like FreeCAD (3D parametric modeling), Elmer (Finite element based simulations), Blender (artistic and technical 3D modeling, animation, video editing) and OpenFOAM (computational fluid dynamics) and GNU Octave (mathematical oriented numerical computation), which are more directly related to their career; but I couldn’t skip talking about GIMP (advanced image editing), LibreOffice (office suite, which I used to compose my slide deck), Inkscape (vector graphics editing) and other less obvious pieces of software that may help them in the future, either to get some non-technical work done to promote themselves and their future business.
The reception couldn’t be more exciting.
Of course I presented the slide deck on Ubuntu, my laptop was running the Mantic Minotaur release, and I made some live demos of the operating system, presented concepts about the Ubuntu Community, how meritocracy and humanity are in the core of what we do and how we empower others around the globe to get their stuff done, from big companies to poor kids running the OS for the first time on an old piece of hardware and being amazed with their bright future as they sharpen their curiosity and explore more and more. Besides raising their attention to the multiple ways one can get involved with Ubuntu, I showed examples of other communities centered in OSS projects I previously mentioned, so they could realize how OSS opens doors for collaboration without borders.
Closing my talk I shared with them examples of Engineers I have the pleasure of knowing in person and other examples I didn’t have that pleasure yet, who have backgrounds either in Architecture, Mechanical or Electrical Engineering and found ways to work mainly with OSS, either as their main tool or, in cases like mine, actually changing careers to work with Software Engineering and contributing to or leading OSS projects.
Closing out
It was a surprise for me to notice how little newer generations know about FOSS despite being surrounded by excellent foundational pieces of software of that kind. It’s up to us to speak up and spread the word to make sure new contributors won’t let the wonderful work this community has already given to the world.
A big thanks to Mauro Gaspari and Aaron Prisk for the tips in preparation for this talk, the UEMA university, especially Professor Carlos Ronyhelton, for opening this opportunity, and a big thanks to the Ubuntu community: the work you’ve done across the years not only allowed me to learn new technical skills but also inspiration to change my career path into one I believe I can make better use of this lifetime and contribute to other’s paths as you did with my own.
I am what I am because of who we all are.