Open Source Origin Stories

My journey in the world of Open Source, Cloud and AI

Today I finished the course “Open Source Origin Stories” at Skills Build by IBM; it was a great course where, with 3 interactive origin stories (like super heroes), you can learn about Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Free Open Source Software.

The course was very interesting, I learnt about Hybrid Clouds, ethics with AI and the history of the Free Software.

Cloud Computing: Public and Private Cloud

One of the main topics was the use cases of Public and Private Clouds, ando how can they be combined in Hybrid Cloud environments:

• Public Cloud

  • It is ideal for scalable apps, testing, development and services that require flexibility and low costs. Providers like IBM Cloud, AWS, or Azure allow pay-as-you-go.

• Private Cloud

  • It is more appropriate when more control or security are required, like in financial or health industries.

• Hybrid Cloud

  • It has the best of both worlds, allows moving workflows to met the business requirements.

An Hybrid Cloud model is becoming more common and strategic in modern organizations.

Ethics and Artificial Intelligence

Another key point of the course was Ethics and AI, a fundamental issue today. I learnt about:

• Biases in data, which may lead to unfair or discriminatory decisions.

• Trustworthiness and transparency, so we can understand how and why a model could take certain choices.

• Responsibility, ensuring AI is used with fairness and aligned to human values.

AI must not only be powerful, but also ethical, explainable, and reliable.

Open Source and Free Software

The course also covers the history of Free Software and Open Source, showing how collaboration has been the key of innovation in technology.

Some key points:

• Open Source projects, like Linux, Kubernetes, Python, Apache, etc.

• Roles inside a project, like the Owner, Author, Maintainers, Auditors and Contributors.

• Licenses

  • Permissive, like MIT or Apache 2.0, allows more usage freedom.

  • Copyleft, like GPL, ensures that the software and its derivatives keep being free.

Open Source is not just code, it's a whole community around the world based in collaboration, learning and knowledge sharing.

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This curse allowed me to understand how these technologies are related and their impact in real life.