Week 12 Blog 💻

💭 Comments on Tom Callaway's blog post.

After reading Tom Callaway’s blog post Musings on Business Models for Open Source Software, I was extremely intrigued by his comparison of open source to business models and wondered what made him think about open source from a business perspective. As I read the blog, Tom Callaway delved into various existing business models for open source software companies, including: Consultancies, Subscription Offerings, Donation model, Open Core, Software as a Service (SaaS), Peace of Mind, and FUD. Whilst asserting that “open source is not a business model”, he drew comparisons between open source software companies and business models, describing each model and then citing open source companies that directly apply to the respective category.

As Tom Callaway continues, he expands on how the majority of the companies in this open source space are open core since selling proprietary software is a relatively straightforward model. However, he states that despite not following this model, Red Hat, by financials, is the most successful company in this space. He emphasizes that the success of Red Hat is directly correlated to their investment in delivering value to their customers and to open source communities. Agreeing with Callaway's point, I also believe that customers place emphasis on the value of the software and if their needs are being met. Furthermore, I feel that Callaway makes a crucial assertion when stating that customers of entirely open source offerings are happier and more engaged, whilst the vendors are more innovative and continue to offer great value. Although I do believe this is true to some degree, I also feel that, with open core model or not, customers will consistently prefer software that provides them with their essential wants and needs. Thus, although the type of business model employed by a company is important, it is not essential factor, because I believe the success of a vendor is reliant on their ability to continuously provide value to customers.

🖥️ Would you want to work in a company that only produced open source software?

After pondering this question, I would work for a company that only produced open source software. After learning about open source software this semester, contributing to projects, and doing my own research on it, I believe that open source software is wonderful! I truly enjoy the community and the efforts put forth by those involved in open source. In the past few months of contributing towards projects, I have felt a sense of contentment in helping better these projects and interacting with those who care so passionately about the projects that they are involved in. I am also a big believer in the spread of knowledge and information; therefore, I am genuinely fond of users being able to view, use, and contribute towards open source software.

However, I believe first and foremost, that I want to work for a company that aligns with my interests; one in which I am truly passionate about. If the company only produced open source software then I would be ecstatic, as I believe that its involvement in the open source community only serves as being beneficial. However, I would still work for a company even if they did not produce only open source software. I believe it is imperative to work for a company that I genuinely enjoy being a part of. Thus, I can see myself working at a company that I am eager about, whether they do or do not, solely produce open source software. As time moves forward and I continue to contribute to open source projects, I will see how my feelings will change, how I will develop, and where I will end up.

💡 Thoughts on "Election Fraud: Is there an open source solution?"

Whilst reading Election Fraud: Is there an open source solution?, the article discusses the project development of an elections technology platform called ElectOS, which will support all aspects of elections administration and voting. I believe that this project has the potential to be extremely powerful and significantly change elections. I feel that many individuals are skeptical of elections; they may be reluctant to participate in elections because they believe that their vote does not hold power or that election results are untruthful. However, I feel that having election information released as Open Source will give back power and trust to the voters, thus resulting in a upturn of voters during election season. As is noted by the article, elections are already under scrutiny due to vulnerable designs, aging machinery, hacking, foreign influence, and human incompetence. Although this platform may not be available this year, I believe it will be an influential stepping stone for elections in the future. It is imperative that individuals enact their right to vote and I feel that an Open Source election platform, such as ElectOS, will be exactly what elections, and voters, need.

🔮 Progress on Gatsby Project:

As of last week, I began working on Issue #22794. As this week occurred, I had also found another ticket I was interested in. This ticket was Issue ##23482. The individual whom opened up the issue addressed that while translating some documentations they discovered some cases where paragraphs/descriptions were spread over multi-lines rather than a single one, which makes the translation process more difficult. Due to my interest in both tickets, I decided to work on both! Since Issue ##23482 seemed more suitable and simple, I began working on this ticket and will put up a pull request sometime this week. Meanwhile, with Issue #22794, I have been doing research and constantly looking through the Gatsby website in order to resolve this issue. Since Issue #22794 is slightly more difficult and I may need clarification on how to make this a successful contribution, I plan on asking other Gatsby contributors questions in order to help me understand what to do!

📚 Research I Have Done This Week/Contributions:

I have continued reading articles on Open Source this week! My favorite ones included: Confluent lands another big round with $250M Series E on $4.5B valuation, Java security, mainframes having a moment, and more industry trends, and The rebirth of Mapzen, new projects bolster PyTorch, faster AI object detection, and other open source news!

I have made contributions to peer blogs and Gatsby so I am awaiting my pull requests to be merged! I will continue to make contributions throughout this following week.