Week of May 4th, 2020 - May 10th, 2020

Wow, this was an extremely productive week. My team and I have gotten a lot more done this week, than towards Atom as a whole.

Thoughts on “Makers and Takers” by Dries Buytaert

As I mentioned in my previous blog, I believe myself to be terrible at arguing and making claims. So, as a disclaimer, although I have opinions, it’s hard for me to factually support them. From reading this article, I have my own viewpoints towards what Buytaert mentioned.

Before I get into it, I just want to say that I LOVE his website domain (dri.es). Having a domain that’s your first name must be so cool. I also love the fact that his blog is dark mode by default.

• For one thing, I like how Buytaert prefaced his thoughts. He started off by mentioning the main three points the blog will address, his background (to enhance credibility), why he’s making these points, and a disclaimers section. I particularly like his “Disclaimers” section because he understands himself that his ideas might seem unappealing due to them going against the nature of open source, but then tries to tell us that he is viewing this from a vantage perspective. I like how he says that he is just offering suggestions, and that he’s not saying that every community should adopt his viewpoint. I enjoy this style of writing a lot because I find it admirable when people admit faults to their own arguments and are willing to see other’s viewpoints. It shows a level of maturity that I aspire to attain one day.

• I found the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” section in this blog interesting. This section highlighted the trade-offs of the Maker and Takers of open source, and how both parties need to contribute to the project in order for maximum efficiency to take place. I have never really thought of the situation like that, but it makes sense. Companies need to do their due diligence in contributing effectively to open source projects if they want the projects to thrive. I appreciate how Buytaert threw in a chart to summarize the pay-off, and I also appreciate his comparison of this to washing dishes at home (if no one does them, then there’ll be no clean plates for everyone). By putting these in, I understood what Buytaert was trying to say a lot better.

• I agree with Buytaert’s statement that all open source communities should encourage software free-riders (those who use the software without ever contributing back). I expressed a similar opinion at the beginning of the semester, where I said that I thought users were the most important part of an open source project. This is because, without users, then what’s the point? What’s the point of consistently maintaining a project if no one’s going to use it? I also agree with what he said later on, that a software free-rider increases the project being known by others by word of mouth. My friend Khinshan told me recently of Lutris, a FOSS game manager for Linux, that I definitely plan on looking into more to play video games on my Ubuntu laptop.

• I don’t find any of Dries’ stances disagreeable, I think he makes very valid points on the future of open source and its sustainability. I really like his idea that companies should experiment with new open source licenses. In my opinion, the idea of new licenses coming out sounds appealing because then we’d know that companies care enough about the open source community to innovate. I enjoyed reading his viewpoints about how open source should scale and grow, and I learned a lot.

FOSS Project Progress

[ ✓ ] Installed Atom’s Development Environment

[ ✓ ] Searched for issues within Atom

[ ✓ ] Found a new project

[ ✓ ] Found possible issues

[ ✓ ] Got OpenCV Set up so I can start making contributions

• I followed OpenCV’s MacOS Installation Guide written by my fellow peer Sajarin Dider. I also followed their guide for writing documentation for OpenCV. I installed Python3, NumPy, CMake, and Doxygen. Doxygen is the tool OpenCV uses to generate the documentation on their website using source code. I ended up asking Daniel and Boubacar for a little assistance on how to go about installing Doxygen, because I was confused on whether or not to download Doxygen using Homebrew, or to just use the dmg download link. I ended up doing both, just to be safe. Other than that, I did not run into any problems.

[ ✓ ] OpenCV Issues

• My team and I opened multiple issues/pull requests within this last week. All of these issues were a team effort. Last Sunday we opened our first OpenCV issue where we noticed that in one of their tutorial pages, there were a couple of broken links. I was astonished by the prompt response time and the helpfulness of the man that responded to us. He thanked us for the feedback and told us that we were free to submit a PR. He even went onto tell us to merge to branch 3.4, because that’s their default branch for bug fixes and documentation fixes. It made me feel a lot more motivated. I immediately thought to myself “Wow, we’re already off to a better start than Atom”. Daniel opened up a pull request on Monday fixing those broken links.

• We opened up another new issue on Monday, where we addressed that some terminal command instructions on their “How to Contribute wiki” did not work. We then went onto suggest a fix, so that the commands would work. Unfortunately, since it’s a Wiki page, we can’t submit a pull request to directly fix the change. However, we are still helping, and that is enough.

• We opened up another quick pull request fixing a broken link on their “How to contribute” guide.

• For our big project, we opened up an issue that focuses on the consolidation of OpenCV’s contour tutorials. We are currently waiting for maintainer/contributor feedback.

Other Activity:

• N/A

~Jessica Wong