About Me

I'm Jomar Silva, a Brazilian Electric Engineer and specialist on Open Source and Open Standards. I started using Open Source Software in my college days (mid-90's), and as soon as I understood that this wasn't only "Free-as-in-beer Software", it totally changed my life and career. I'm honored to be nominated for this election by SouJava.

My personal journey on Open Source communities

I was at the college at a time where proprietary was the way to go on Software, and especially in Brazil, we only had access to portions of technology - even proprietary - if it was useful for the business purpose of tech companies. Most of the time, we had to learn from bread crumbs they dropped around, and even in that situation we felt so happy and privileged. One training on proprietary technology or computer language used to cost more than a brand new car. Usually you needed to be really lucky and have a good job for someone to invest on you.

The Internet and Open Source totally changed that game. We were then empowered to learn to the point we felt comfortable, meeting people over the journey and also sharing knowledge, code and experience with everyone around. It changed the life of several friends of mine, gave us hope to be a global player on software, and opened many opportunities to everyone.

I started engaging with Open Source communities in Brazil in 2002, and it was like a hurricane in my life. In 2006, I was invited to lead the ODF Alliance in Brazil, later on Latin America, and on this wonderful journey I ended up being a contributor for the Open Document Format v1.2 at OASIS, and coordinating the adoption of ODF as a National Standard in Brazil. This journey also included my participation on the "controversial" (to be economic with my words) OpenXML ballot at JTC1 ISO/IEC. I was part of the whole process, as a Brazilian Delegate on JTC1 - SC34, and I integrated the Brazilian delegation on the OpenXML BRM held in Geneva. 

That episode impacted not only the way JTC1 evaluate external contributions, but also put Open Standards on the center of discussion in several countries, so I also had the opportunity to travel for a few in Latin America, Europe and Africa to present, and discuss ODF, Open Standards and Open Source adoption as a central part of public policies for economic & technological development, and also national sovereignty. 

During those years, I partnered with the OpenOffice/BrOffice community, I had close contact with the heroic people that created LibreOffice and also was one of the first committers of Apache OpenOffice, after I helped with the code donation discussions between the community and Oracle. I followed all the incubation process of Apache OpenOffice, and I had to leave soon after the project were graduated.

In 2012, I joined Intel as a Developer Evangelist, and worked for 8 years helping developers in Latin America to quickly ramp up and master key global technologies like HTML5, IoT, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence, always heavily based on Open Source Software.

In 2020 I accepted the offer to build and lead the Developer Relations in a Brazilian Company that already created 4 open source projects, and back to the "pure software" industry I found a situation that shocked me: Open Source is everywhere, most of the developers between 20 to 36 years never had to work with proprietary technologies the way I was forced on my old days. They have the Open Source style of life, they are always open to share code and knowledge, but... They don't know much about software licences, patents, copyright, intellectual property rights and also they usually don't really understand how the network value that is activated with the Open Source ecosystem generates revenue and boosts our tech industry today. I had the opportunity to explain this in a light talk I delivered on 2020 State of The Source event (5 first minutes of this video)

Why I'm running 

I would like to run for this election, because I want to contribute with the Open Source Initiative to ignite those not-so-clear values in the extremely vibrant Open Source developer ecosystem we have today. A good understanding of all the benefits from Open Source are key to incentivize more and more contributions to Open Source projects, strengthen the sense of ownership of software that people "just use" today, and also to help the communities to understand how Open Source is key to build new business and ecosystem. I can contribute with my +17 years on Developer Relations to make it happen.

We are also facing a time where licence changes are impacting a lot the network effect, the contributing processes and also impacting the business ecosystem and the fundamental principles of Open Source. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and I'm volunteering to take my shift

Feel free to contact me on Twitter or LinkedIn. My current blog in Portuguese is this one, but someone that I don't know who or why restored over the past months my old blog, and it is available here. All the OOXML facts are there.