"Pardus and Free Software in Turkey" event was hosted by TUBITAK on Friday, April 21, 2017 as we celebrated the 20th anniversary of Internet Week in Turkey. Many applications used between these years were created with the free software philosophy. Within the framework of this commemoration event, free software, Pardus and the internet in Turkey were discussed. Within these topics, cyber security and many interconnected issues were also brought to the agenda.

The first step of the Internet in Turkey was taken with TRNET on April 12, 1993 in cooperation with METU TÜBİTAK. This was the beginning of the popularization of the Internet and Free Software. In 2005, Pardus entered our lives with its first version. Later, in late 2011, it started to be applied to smart boards with the Fatih project. In this way, it started to become widespread in National Education. The versions obtained have become very popular products in international fairs. Pardus continues to be developed to offer solutions to public institutions in the corporate sense.

In the panel, the importance of the use of open source in the IT units of public and universities and the development of university students on open source was emphasized. The cyber security issues needed in the public sector were stated as high quality standards and easy to use. It was pointed out that these priorities can be achieved with free software teams consisting of a large number of people. In addition to open source software development, it was emphasized that software development with the free software philosophy would be more beneficial and would lead to a faster development process. It was emphasized that the main goal at this point is to develop big software with small contributions from all over the world. In this way, it was stated that with a large accumulation of knowledge, it can be controlled through the eyes of a large number of users and become a family. While this kind of software systematic without a single owner is expected to be problematic in terms of support, on the contrary, it was also stated that there are no problems with the support of the software with the services provided by the companies that develop software in this field from the private sector.