Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) es un evento europeo no comercial, organizado por voluntarios, centrado en el desarrollo de software libre y de código abierto . Está dirigido a desarrolladores y a cualquier persona interesada en el movimiento de software libre y de código abierto. Su objetivo es permitir que los desarrolladores se reúnan y promuevan la conciencia y el uso del software de código abierto y libre.
FOSDEM se celebra anualmente, generalmente durante el primer fin de semana de febrero, en el Campus de Solbosch de la Universidad Libre de Bruselas en el sureste de Bruselas, Bélgica.
Este año, Paula participó con la charla “The New Internet: let’s talk about IPFS”:
Step by step, internet as we know it is currently being limited, censored and monitored. To prevent and fight against this, there are associations, activists and such... and one of the proposals is... IPFS protocol. IPFS is, as the official website describes "peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open". It wants to offer a distributed alternative protocol, making it more resilient which is handy in case of developing countries, for example.
In this speech I'd love to introduce the reasons that brought internet community to care about distributed internet, what is IPFS and how to easily setup and start using it on linux terminal and web interface.
We are in the late 80's, internet is very exciting, everyone want to have a webpage... Communication has changed, and we are going into a new lifestyle, in which we can be anonymous, there are no walls between users and knowledge is open. But... uh-oh, some countries are not very happy with this statements... Internet begins to have such importance, it shapes society. If you where an ambitious company or country, wouldn't you think... Who has internet control has society influence, right?
This was actually predicted by some computer scientist and technology related persons back then, and that's why associations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation were created. As internet has evolved since then, it has been limited and censored, as I already describe above. Tim Berners Lee (world wide web) already expressed the need of a new way of understanding the internet, more specifically, a distributed way of doing it. One of the most ambitious projects for decentralize the internet is IPFS, a distributed protocol that can be used from the terminal and has a web interface, very user-friendly.
I aim to show the basic commands, explaining the close-future options that this protocol give us, and explain why is this important.