OSD
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:
- Incorrect definitions of FOSS
- 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.
The second point is how the culture in the community focuses on developers which results in the loss of a large number of potential users. She pointed out a few problems:
- Documentation for non-programmers
- Qualify of user-interface
- Code of conduct
For the third one, she recommended coaching the person who has unexpected behavior because everyone has their own standards. Banning them out right away may result in avoiding missing users/contributors. I strongly agree with this because one can violate what others think is “common-sense” without knowing that.
Another thing I thought that was important to note is how she responded when one of my classmates asked her how she identifies herself as a woman that is seen as a minority in the industries. She answered, saying that she exits, and there’s no point for only emphasizing the gender problem because it is not the only problems related to minorities where there are a bunch of other minority groups.