Week of April 27th, 2020 - May 3rd, 2020

For me personally, this week has been a bit more productive than the rest. Ever since the lockdown, motivation was something I had to force out of myself. Gradually, I have started to get a little more dedicated towards my passions, especially with all things tech. I hope this motivation of mine will be here to stay.

Business Models for Open Source

• I read an article by Tom Callaway titled “Musings on business models for open source software”. Previous speakers Gil Yehuda and Vicky Brasseur have also touched on business models for open source, but this article delved a little deeper into the logistics of it. I first want to say that I’m quite surprised that the code for companys’ subscription model is open source. Cloud engineering interests me, and this article is kind of inspiring me to look deeper into the Cloud technologies and solutions for Enterprise use cases.
• Callaway then weighed the pros and cons of the open core business model, as opposed to companies that focus on open source alone. I first want to say that I really appreciate Callaway’s style of writing. I like the way he types, but what I appreciate the most is the way he constructs his claim. Personally, I am terrible at arguing, because I simply do not focus on the other viewpoint as much as I should. He, on the other hand, tries to advocate for a pure open source business model like Red Hat, while still considering the goods and bads of the open core model. I found the way he went about it to be brilliant. When he first explained the open core model, my first thought was: “Oh, this model seems very smart, and it makes sense why companies would use it.” After he discussed the disadvantages of such a model, and rather talking about the increased value of open source alone, I started to take his side. I think that a company that produces mainly open source software would be extremely valuable for the consumers and the developers.

Election Fraud and Open Source

• I think electronic voting is long overdue. I am surprised that voting remotely isn’t even an option at this point. The presidential primary for New York has been canceled, and there is not even an option to vote online. The only option is to mail-in our ballots. That is ridiculous. Reading this article, I am not surprised that the technology used for voting is completely ancient, malfunctions shouldn’t be a surprise. Who knows if somebody sitting in office today is only there due to this terrible voting system. Election outcomes would probably go a lot differently if we had a more sustainable system to vote with, which is why I am really glad that the Open Source Election Technology (OSET) Institute is working hard to change the future of our elections. I hope that by the next presidential election in 2024, we wouldn’t have this problem anymore. For election purposes, I think making the technologies open source would be pretty awesome.

FOSS Project Progress

[ ✓ ] Installed Atom’s Development Environment

[ ✓ ] Searched for issues within Atom

Work on our issue

[ ✓ ] Find a new project

• As stated in Week 11’s blog post, Daniel, Boubacar, and I chose to work on OpenCV for our new open source project. However, that decision wasn’t made for sure until this weekend. This is because we were still tentatively throwing out other project ideas, such as Pandas and Python-DS. We even went so far as to even consider the more “giant” projects, like Python and Vim.

[ ✓ ] Find possible issues

• Daniel, Boubacar, and I had a couple of video chats this weekend to discuss further action regarding our open source project. We ultimately aggregated a lot of potential issues in our collaborative text-editing file. They ranged from simple grammar fixes in their tutorials, to the merging of two almost identical files, to rewriting an entire tutorial algorithm from C++ to Python. It was decided that we would try to get some small documentation/tutorial edits in, and then hopefully jump to enhancing their tutorials with some Python.

• While we were thoroughly reading through a lot of OpenCV docs, we found that there were broken links on the Introduction to OpenCV-Python Tutorials page. We then quickly put together an issue and quickly got a response! They thanked us and told us that we were welcome to make a pull request with the updated links. I am already noticing a much more communicative, friendlier and welcoming community than Atom. I have notified my team of the response and we’ll work on the PR immediately. I see this as our first FOSS Project Progress success, and I am really happy.

[ WIP ] Get OpenCV Installed and Running

• I read through OpenCV’s contributing document to see what further steps I should take, and to see what the community expects from me. This contributing document mainly focuses on coding contributions, and so it wasn’t until the very end where they told us to go to this link to figure out how to contribute to the documentation…It is pretty lengthy but my team and I are planning to focus on sifting through this tutorial so that we can focus on working on our documentation/tutorial issues ASAP! (we’re running out of time ;-;)

Other Activity:

• My open source professor gave the class an interesting question: “Would you want to work in a company that only produced open source software?”. Well, I first want to preface by saying that I do not want to be overly picky, and that I would definitely work at almost any company willing to see my talents and hire me as a software engineer. I would just love to get a full-time job offer after graduation. Prior to taking my open source software development course if someone asked me for my preference in companies (if I had a choice), I would have immediately responded with a top tech company, such as Google, Microsoft, or Facebook, without hesitation. However, based off of the talks from Vicky Brasseur, Gil Yehuda, and Kevin Fleming, based off of my reading of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and based off of my own research, my vision for the companies I’d like to work for in the near future has changed. I think the concept of open source software is extremely cool, and I have come across a lot of genuinely kind communities. I also think it’s cool how open source technologies are a lot more customer-focused as opposed to proprietary software, and I love the idea that somebody who doesn’t work at my company can still help me fix my code. Seeing the success of Red Hat is also quite inspiring. So now, if somebody asked me for my preference in companies, if I had a choice, it would still be a top tech company, but I would definitely open my horizons and keep a leek out for open source software focused companies.

~Jessica Wong