This Week in HFOSS - 2/10/14

Outside of today not having class, HFOSS has been rather interesting. We spent much of last week going over discussion on a chapter from Steve Weber's book The Success of Open Source. I personally found the reading rather dry, but it did capture some of the more interesting elements of open source development rather well. It could have stood to broaden its horizons a bit, but otherwise a decent read. You can find a slightly more in-depth analysis of the chapter as a whole here.

We also spent a bit of time talking about the local meet up for the ROC.py meet-up tomorrow. Mostly centered around who would be doing the driving and who would be going with who. I won't be in attendance due to some prior engagements which means I have to miss the talk on introducing python to people. I personally have only done very minor work in python, only when helping a friend with their CS homework in my freshman year. I hope that as the semester goes on, I will be able to catch up with those that did go in terms of experience. Till next time...

Article Follow-up: The Success of Open Source

The "article" as written by Steve Weber had a few interesting tidbits concerning certain pillars and principals. I think it would be worth it to look into them a little bit more

1. What are the 5 Pillars of the "Open Source Way"?

-Open Exchange

-Participation

-Rapid Prototyping

-Meritocracy

-Community

2. What are the 8 General Principals that Weber lists?

-Make it Interesting and make it happen

-Scratch an Itch

-Minimize how often you have to reinvent the wheel

-Solve problems through parallel work processes wherever possible

-Leverage the Law of Large Numbers

-Document what you do

-Release Early and Release Often

-Talk a lot

3. How are the 5 Pillars and Weber's General Principals similar?

Namely, the pillars and principals share the same idea of what people within the open source community to be doing. Communicate and work together with one another. This is most apparent between the Open Exchange Pillar and not reinventing the wheel and leverage of law of large numbers principals. 

4. How are they different?

Weber chooses to go much more in depth with each point than any of the general principals do. This puts more focus on specific elements like working together which is not quite as strongly represented in the pillars. The pillars also put forward meritocracy which isn't really brought up by Weber.

Bonus:

In Weber's analysis, he draws heavily on Eric S. Raymond's text "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which can be found here 

What is Open Source? - Article Overview

Who: Steve Weber

What: What is Open Source and How does it work?

When: 2004

Where: Here

Gist: This is the who, what, where, and why of open source, detailing the many facets that go into creating open source software. This ranges from creation to maintaining


The Good:
-Showing the origins of what is probably the largest open-source project in the world
-Explaining the various solutions people have come up with to the variety of problems open source developers
- Help explain the reasoning behind why people go into making open source software.

The Bad:
- Fairly dense which makes it a little tiring to read in a single sitting
- Spends a large amount of time on points which could be spent better on furthering the point
- A little too in depth for just an introduction

Questions:
- Why is open source referred to as a bazaar if it really isn't?
- Who are some of the other big names in Open Source development?
- What are some of the other big open source projects?

In The End:
The "article" was on the whole fine and provided a fairly good summary of the history and process behind open source development. That said, it was fair bit longer than it needed to be, mostly due to going back to the same points over and over. While I found it a decent read, I can't really recommend it for anyone who isn't already interested in open source development. I give it 3/5 commits.

HFOSS: Week 2

This was a fairly slow week as it mostly focused on us learning how to use both the IRC Client that we are going to be using for the remainder of the class and working with Git. The only thing about this is that I already had to go through the process before due to a different class. That in mind it was a nice refresher to the information and allowed me to actually understand more about how to uses Github. I had some issues using Github in the other class, mostly due to an issue with our network drives and not fully understanding how to work it.

I am hopeful looking into the coming weeks as we should be able to get into some material that I haven't gone over yet. I really want to get into the things we talked about in the first day. I've only worked very little in python and think it would be fun to work in more. We'll see as things go on.

My foray into HFOSS begins!

Well, I didn't think that I would be doing an open source software class when I started this blog, but here we are. I have been exposed to FOSS before. Specifically back when I was in 6th grade or so when my father gave me an old laptop of his for me to use. It had recently been wiped completely clean and had Unix installed on it. Admittedly, I wasn't much of a programmer or anything when I was 12, so some of the subtleties were lost on me.

Either way, I am interested in seeing what I can do with this little adventure into learning about open-source software more and some of thing things I will be able to do with it. Off we go!