Faiumoni is an association to support education in the area of Free Software.

Why Open Source Software?

Open Source Software (alt. Free Software) is software that may be used, studied, modified and shared freely. This implies that the source code of the program is available. Therefore Open Source Software is useful to learn coding, software-design and project management in software-projects.

Furthermore unlike commercial software, it is common in open source projects to share ideas, concepts and the source code during the development phases before the software is completed. So a discussion with other interested people is possible at an early stage. This often has a positive impact on the quality of the software and the know-how of the developers. [1]

It is allowed by open source software licenses to adept programs to ones own needs. Even small changes may increase the usefulness of a program for some people significantly. This is an easy way to get starting with software development. The results are more motivating than having to implement a program that solves simple mathematical problems for a computer science course at an university.

To name one example: Stendhal is developped by the Arianne project. It has been translated to Chinese, Polish and German by independent groups. The polish group event went further: They added a model of the city Krakow, to teach the history and culture of the city [2]. Furthermore Stendhal was used as the foundation for a diploma thesis on dynamic content adaption [3] at the FU Berlin, a master thesis on cloud computing [4] at the ETU Zurich and a dissertation on artificial intelligence [5] at the Tel-Aviv University.

History

The Arianne project was founded in 1999 as an open source software project. In 2006 it got public attention because of the development of Stendhal. It grew in the next couple of years, as more and more users and developers got interested in the project. This includes many people that did not have previous experience in the development of software. They learned software development by implementing small projects with support by the Arianne developers.

In 2010 the Arianne project celebrated its tenth birthday and the fifth birthday of Stendhal by organizing the first meeting in the real world. The idea to use the meeting as platform to share experience and knowledge came up quickly. The FHDW Hannover kindly provided a room with project and white board for our workshop, so that we were able to do talks.

On the workshop it was realized that we have been sharing a lot of knowledge in the last couple of years. So the idea was born to found an association in order to give an organisational foundation to the previously rather random sharing of knowledge.

Faiumoni and Arianne are cooperating tightly because the different areas of focus fit togehter nicely.

What does the name Faiumoni mean?

The Faiumoni e. V. is named after the main continent in Stendhal. The original plan was to name it Arianne, but a clear distinction between the association and the open source project is useful.

After long discussions we settled for the name of the continent in the world of Stendhal, because something as broad as a continent fits the diverse nature of the educational area of Free Software.

The German suffix "e. V." means "eingetragener Verein" ("registered association").

1. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral & the Bazaar. Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. O’Reilly & Associates. ISBN 0596001088 (Summary in Wikipedia)
2. Article in the news paper Gazeta Wyborcza Nr. 294, (Artikel)
3. Joachim Fohringer, Dynamische Contentanpassung bei Massive Multiplayer Online Games, Diplomarbeit an der FU Berlin (Webseite)
4. Samuel Pasquier, The Cirrostratus Platform Concepts, Architecture and Evaluation, Master-Arbeit at the ETH Zuric (Arbeit)
5. Daniel Kario, Player-like world an open environment for online games research, Ph. D. project at the Tel-Aviv University. (FAQ)