Computer Science Seminar Series

Abstract

The primary topic of this lecture will be open source entrepreneurship, discussing ways of how a business can be run on open source foundations, in a commercial world. I will use my own story as an anecdote, introducing my own software as a jQuery plug-in and discussing how and when to use jQuery, particularly in modern web-development. I'll then skim over what open source is, the growing role of open source as an enabler of entrepreneurship, and talk more fully about DataTables and why it was created. From there I can introduce how it was commercialised and a business built around it, generalising these topics with examples from the wider open source world.

Bio

Allan Jardine is an entrepreneur of open source. He created the software start-up SpryMedia. Allan is well known among web developers for being the creator of various jQuery plug-ins, particularly the Datatables library, one of the most popular jQuery plug-ins. Allan studied Electronic Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, where he then went on to do a PhD in Information Theory. During that time he found that he enjoyed programming a whole lot more than electronics and switched his hobby of web-development to be his career. Allan worked for a couple of established companies for around 5 years, before starting his own business in 2011, based on the open source DataTables library.

Host: Santiago Chumbe

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