Week 13

Balancing Makers and Takers to scale and sustain Open Source

The author makes good points on the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the idea of public goods and common goods. The Prisoner’s Dilemma encourages 2 different companies to all contribute to Open Source to maximize the total profits. Interesting to know that the investment in Open Source is not charity. It’s making the Open Source project competitive in the market, and competition helps bring out everyone’s potential. The author states, “For end users, Open Source projects are public goods; the shared resource is the software. But for Open Source projects are common goods; the shared resource is the (potential) customer.” Open Source companies encouraged software free-riders because they believe that it’s more important to have more users than their competitors. It doesn’t matter too much if the users choose not to contribute back. In this case, the market competition among Open Source companies is similar to the market competition among private companies. They are increasing their profits by competing for potential users.

One thing that bothers me is when the author mentions privatization in Open Source projects. For example, “Automatic is the only company that can use WordPress.com”. I understand that privatization can solve the free-rider problem. However, isn’t Open Source project “free” for everyone. Does limiting the users violate the Open Source project? Or is it only “free” to the end-users and not the companies?

Next.js

week 13

1. Shania and Michelle fixed the overwrite and the Unhandled Promise Rejection Warning
2. Michelle added home page, ismophic-unfetch, and delete/add/edit functionality to our pet care application
3. ChiShing and I started to draft README.md for our with-mongodb example
4. Shania and ChiShing added css.style to our pet care application
5. I created a small logo (not sure if it can be used on the project or not)

Contribution

This Wednesday, I joined a workshop conducted by Google called “Google X CUNY Open Source”. It was presented by Willem de Bruijin. During his presentation, he briefly talked about what is open source software, and how to contribute to an Open Source project on GitHub. He shared this link while he’s explaining the Open Source licenses. He also demonstrated how we can search for things like “C++ label easy” or “C++ first-timers only” in the GitHub search bar to find a project that best matches our interests. One thing that I like the most is when he told us about thefirst-contributions repo. This project is there to help people who are new to open source to make their first contribution. Basically, the README explains all the steps of forking the project, cloning creating branch, pulling, pushing, opening a PR, etc. All you need to do is add your name and your GitHub link in the contributor list, and that’s your first contribution. I think this project is beneficial in getting people to join the Open Source community. I also made a contribution to it.

P.S. It’s also interesting that these two Git commands: “git format-patch -l” and “git send-email –to=*.patch" allows us to turn the project into an email format and send it through email.