Week 13

Balancing Makers and Takers to scale and sustain Open Source

In Dries’s article, the ideas of sustain and scale Open Source Projects are distinct and profound. I agreed with his explanation of Makers and Takers. In the rule of thumb, he mentioned, Takers were only focusing on the gains obtained from their private business and not caring about the open source project they worked on. On the other hand, Makers care about the gains from both of their businesses and the open source project they worked on. If both Takers and Makers are working on the same project. Since the Takers willing to invest more in their private businesses, the Takers’ advantages were strong higher than the Makers, which was the opensource projects. When Makers found out there was no profit to make, the behavior of Takers will eventually make the Makers become Takers. Soon, it will destroy the open source project or the community.

Week 12

Musings on business models for open source software

I do agree with Callaway’s Foresight on customers are starting to see the real values of open source. Once an application or software is published, if there are no users using it. The company will eventually lose the reasons to improve its own application. However, if it is an open-source project or software, it might have other people that are interested in the project. They will continue to contribute and improve the project by deploying new features, or bug fixing.

Week 11

Vicky Brasseur

To me, the most impressive idea in Brasseur’s talks was the importance of the documentation. It gives me an image of a FOSS project’s soul was the documentation. She mentioned documentation of a FOSS project was the information or the manual of a project that in your brain that you wanted to put it in another person’s brain. Indeed, good documentation needs a decent amount of time and it needed to be up to date or maintaining frequently. Also, it was extremely complicated to write good documentation. Although writing the documentation was hard, the returns from documentation were invaluable. New users were able to accomplish their problem with the FOSS project by following the documentation. Once they completed, they eventually gained satisfaction from it, and they were more willing to share the FOSS project with friends and others. This was the reason why I think the documentation was the soul of a FOSS project.

Week 10

Folding@Home’s Covid19 Activity

The article was basically about how to treat the COVID-19 as protein. Folding@home first simulates the Ebola virus as protein and uses the computers to run the simulation on calculating the protein movement. Since the protein movement is similar to the virus, it can be also be tested while proceeding to cure treatment testing simulation. Thus, it can find a solution to the treatment of COVID-19.