Student in CSci 395.86 in Hunter College, Spring 2020
I have to agree with Buytaert, that extreme takers turn makers into takers. Thus, hurting the open source project in the process. A way to avoid the imbalance of makers and takers, Buyaert suggests applying centralization, privitazation, and self-governance to open source projects. I don’t necessarily agree with applying privitazation to open source as such a model could lock out other potential investors.
Vicky BrasseurAfter hearing Brasseur’s talk, I read Open Source is Not About You with a new perspective. When Rich states,
Gil Yehuda Kevin FlemingBefore hearing from Fleming, I knew Bloomberg was a company that focused on financial data. However, I did not know the extent to which their customers depended on Bloomberg’s tools to do their jobs. For example, the Bank of England had planned to sell government bonds but was unable to because Bloomberg was having issues. I found the “Card Sorting excercise” interesting as I had no knowledge in how companies perform product evaulations. For the “Card Sorting excercise”, a test for menu structure, Bloomberg uses eye detection technology to figure out where people are looking at on the menus.
I, like my peers and professors, walked into school on Wednesday, March 11 not knowing it would be our last day. It seems as if whoever was in charge of notifying Hunter College’s switch to remote learning did a poor job in doing so, considering many staff members and students found out through a tweet from CUNY’s twitter account. Both professors and students had many questions, that were left unanswered with “I don’t know”s. In retrospect, perhaps switching to remote learning wasn’t as irrupt as it seemed, as many colleges including other CUNYs, switched days prior. Nevertheless, it was an unsettling day, which has yet to seem real to me. We said our goodbyes as for some of us it would be the last time we would be seeing one another. I, at least have 1 or 2 semesters left at Hunter but for others this is their last semester of college and from here they’re thrown into the “real world”.
I haven’t been in the FOSS scene for too long so I have yet to see the sense of entitlement in FOSS as described by Rich. Nevertheless, I have to agree with Rich. As new contributor to FOSS, I don’t have the right to dictate a FOSS project as I desire. I do have the right to suggest my desires and/or contribute my desire. Furthermore, my contributions don’t have to be accepted as it may not fit with the vision of the FOSS project.
Initially, my teammates and I chose Teammates to be the open source project we would work on in the course of this sememster. Upon further inspection, we realized we would have trouble contributing to the project as it required knowledge of technologies that some of us were not familiar with such as Servlet, Angular, and Google App Engine. Thus our search continued, we created a google docs to share OSS projects we were interested in and created mini project evaluations to aid us in our decision making process. Ultimately, we were drawn to next.js for its plentiful “Good First Issues”, and supportive and active community.
The project my group was assigned to evaluate was Godot. For the most part, answering the evaluation questions was a breeze except for the “Activity Level”. I wish I had raised my hand in the beginning of class to ask “Is there a way to filter pull requests, issues, and commits for the past six months?”. Perhaps, I would have been a hero that Tuesday morning (assuming others had the same issue). Although I believed there existed a way to filter for the past 6 months, my teammates and I found our answers manually. We ended up having to do good old elementary math. For instance, we would go to “closed issues”, count the max issues that appear on one page and get the number of pages since six months ago (MAX issues in one page * # of pages = ~# of closed issues in the past 6 months). Besides the unexpected math in the morning, the evaluation activity served as a reminder on what to look for in projects besides the essential four documents. The activity overall ingrained in me the importance of an active and friendly community in an open source project.
List of OSS I found Interesting
What skills do I have that would be useful for contributing to a FOSS project?
In all the tech events I have attended, I have not failed to hear the words “open source”. I’ll admit, every now and then I would do a quick google search, click on one of first three links, read the contents from that link for 3 seconds, and unfortunately I’d forget about it until the next tech event. So why am I here? I’ve decided to end what perhaps would have been an infinite loop (ignore the condition upon my death). Taking this course will end my repetitive behavior by finally enlightening me to the ways of open source software. So far, I’m not disappointed in my decision. In fact, I’m excited! I feel that open source software will allow me to take on software that I believed were intimidating to even build. Perhaps now I’ll be one of those people uttering the words “open source” in my next tech event.