Education to Free Software

While I was volunteering at the Info desk at Fosdem, I was approached by a visitor looking for information on how to get started with Linux. The man had already installed various distros, and his daytime job was as a mainframe programmer. He knew COBOL and assembly. Initially, I was a bit surprised that he felt he needed help. He was looking for courses, starting with the command line, through programming linux applications. I thought everybody was learning with forums and how-tos on the web. There seem to be hundreds of those on the web. For example, linuxcommand.org. He answered he did not learn well that way.

How do you learn Free Software?

I ended up recommending a mixture of Evi Nemeth’s book on Unix administration, Linux from scratch and a new Open University course. But I felt he was still somehow disappointed. He was not interested in becoming a system administrator, or adept at that or other task (setting up Apache, Samba, compiling a kernel, ifconfig and tcp wrappers, python gui programming and whatnot). He was looking something along the lines on how to become a free software hacker.

Becoming a hacker

You will object there are thousands of ways of becoming a hacker, and one of the nice things is that there is no one true path. Nevertheless, some technologies are more important than others in the current ecosystem. Think of bash + C + python. So there probably could be some course/book/workshop along the lines of: master key free software technologies. And attendees need not be n00bs: it could be people proficient with other technology. It could be programmers familiars with other environments, scientists, statisticians. Community is important. Our visitor expressed an explicit interest in helping and participating. This course should preferably be in presence, or at least contain a sizeable online participation component, and embed interacting with distributions and collaborating on code all along. A great way to have packaging and version control there from the start.

Lightweight Free Software workshops

There are commercial training offerings, but they are mostly geared towards companies. This means expensive, and in some cases outright rip-off, as is usual when the people learning are not the same as those paying for it. Also, these events can be very dry and rigidly programmed. So I think it would be interesting to organize with a different pedagogical formula, with a lower price, with a more informal feel but a serious program, geared towards individuals. Think aquarelle evening courses, but more geeky. It could last a month, two evenings per week, from 18 to 20, say. What do you think?