Inkscape

It’s been the busiest week this semester for me. I had two projects to be done, had to complete some paperwork for my status, had an interview, and on top of them, I had a fever which could affect my graduation. Fortunately, it went away (I believe) with some rest. Next week should be better and the following week I have two finals. I hope everything goes okay. Although it was our presentation week, I could not make any contributions, so I will have to depend on past contributions for it. It’s my first time presenting online, and I am pretty nervous about it. I know it cannot be an excuse and absolutely needs to be fixed, but it has also been pretty tough presenting in English. Anyway, We had a couple of meetings to create our slides, and discussed who is showing what. I have been learning about Docker and Docker Overlay to improve inkscape-ci-docker, which currently only has ci builds integrations to the main inkscape repo and the extension repo. However, learning the concept of overlay networks seems impossible to be done in a short-term, so I decided to add it to my post-graduation todo list.

Business Models using Open Source

By reading blog post Musings on Open Source Software Bossiness Model, I learned several bossiness models using or creating free and open source.

Talk by Vicky Brasseur

We had a guest speaker Vicky Brasseur who is a the former Vice President of the Open Source Initiative. Since the one hour talk was extremely dense, I might have missed some details, but if I got it correctly, there were two main points she emphasized which are:

1. Incorrect definitions of FOSS
2. The “Developer Central” culture in the community

For the first point, it is not only for student programmers, including myself, but a lot of professional developers. Before taking this course, I have thought the word “open source” indicates source code shared to the public (i.e., a course project hosted on GitHub); however, there is a strict definition for what a “Open Source Software” is. If a project violates any of the conditions defined in OSD (Open Source Definition), it’s not open source. She emphasized if a project shared with the public does not have a licence, the owner reserves all the rights, meaning that no one other than the owner can reproduce or distribute the project or source code, which is very unlikely open source.

Talk by Gil Yehuda

We had a guest speaker Gil Yehuda, who is working at Verison Media as a Sr. Director of the Open Source department. I appreciate his spending time with our class. His main point was how essential for us to (especially for students looking for a job) to be involved with open-source projects. Contributing to a project with quality validates your skills because that means the maintainers officially accept your work.

Why to Report Bugs

A blog post They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken triggered me to report a problem in one of Inkscape’s installation script, which I wrote briefly about in this previous post. The author says, “It’s a horrifying thought, but it could be that for every one person who opens an issue on GitHub, 100 or more people have already tried your project, run into that same bug, and simply moved on”, and I noticed that it just happened to me a few weeks ago. I just found a way out and moved on, and I felt it is the same thing. It is not easy to find out if the bug is critical for many users, especially if you do not know much about the project. However, just reporting a bug could be a huge contribution if many users are experiencing the same issue.

Everyone in the world is having difficult time due to the situation, and I hope you and people around you are doing well.

Completed

• Read this charter about Website moderators.
• Requested an membership to the Moderators

Our team is working on a free and open-source graphical editor called InkScape licensed under Gnome General Public License. One of the main features of this project is that it is mainly used for editing vector images. SVG and PDF are some examples of their formats. According to Wikipedia, "Vector graphics are computer graphics images that are defined in terms of 2D points, which are connected by lines and curves to form polygons and other shapes". Unlike bitmap images, they do not consist of dots, so you don't see blurred squares when you enlarge the photo. That's cool. I thought only Adobe editors were used for this purpose, since I barely use graphical editors.

Umar, Mohammed and I did an evaluation on VSCode, Microsoft’s open-source IDE. I’ve used the editor before and thought it was super light and snappy, but I did not love it. However, it’s worth knowing about the project since I hear a lot of positive reviews on it.

What skills do I have that would be useful for contributing to a FOSS project?

• Web development skills

  • Frontend Skills (JavaScript and its web frameworks, HTML and CSS)
  • Backend Skills (Mysql, Django (Python), C++)

• Language

  • Japanese

How would I like to contribute?

Until recently, I did not know that writing some code is not the only way to contribute to open source. For example, you can contribute by improving or translating their documentation, suggesting a new feature to the project, or even helping to organize some events and more. These are all respectable ways to contribute to open-source projects. Those might not be the fanciest ways, as a beginner, I think I should focus on writing, improving, or translating documentation over the semester. Off course, it would be great if I do that by writing some code.

Well, to be honest, I needed to take some electives to graduate, and I suppose most of my classmates are in the same situation. However, I have some justifications on why I chose to take this course rather than other electives.