Members of the Computer Science Department attending the OpenSourceSymposium at Angelo State University on Saturday, April 26, 2008.  Open Source software is generally developed by a group of people working collaboratively, and the code is open and available for individuals to study and modify as specified in the license agreement.  Examples of open source software used at McMurry are Moodle, Firefox, Linux, Apache, and mySQL.

Dr. Robby Watson, Mr. Rich Brozovic, and Dr. A. T. Wyatt attended a number of sessions on open source projects and programming languages. Other McM faculty and staff members attending the conference were Dr. R. G. Rittenhouse (CIS faculty), Mr. Jim Quinnett (University Webmaster), and Mr. Scott Fritz (Director of Network Services).

Particularly interesting sessions included one on Parrot, a virtual machine designed to compile and execute code written in a number of different languages; one on Python; and one on strategies for encouraging non-programmers to contribute to open source projects.

Everyone enjoyed the conference and is looking forward to attending (and possibly presenting) next year!