Open Source Evangelism

Me and Open Source is a long story that started around ten years ago, and it’s only this year that I started introducing myself as Open Source Evangelist even if it was part of my job and my every day’s activity since many years.

This year I felt the need to talk about Open Source more than any time before, not to invite people to embrace Open Source technologies and ideologies – I’m technologist not an ideologist anyway – but it’s more about showing real-life technical problems and how to solve them using Open Source solutions.

If Evangelist is not an appropriate term, maybe I can use the term Expert instead ? But I don’t consider myself expert in all Open Source technologies the reason why I have preference for the term Evangelism. And you have probably noticed that some evangelists by defending Open Source become totally in opposition to proprietary solutions, this is not my case hopefully.

Both proprietary and Open Source solutions are part of the same Eco-system today and I think everybody is free to decide which is better for them or make them co-exist. But in the same way that there are companies that defend their proprietary solutions, I think Open Source still need more evangelists to defend it the right way.

I just wanted to post this article to clarify some ideas about Open Source Evangelism. You will hear me talking more frequently about “High Availability Open Source in e-Government and Enterprise” in the next days not to say why we should use it, but with the main focus on how we can use it correctly.