Reflecting So Far

Afer taking midterm reflections realized that I have learned so much about Open Source and how much my opinion on FOSS has changed. Before even choosing to take this class, I viewed open source software as inferior to proprietary software. I could not see any advantages of open source other than standing on moral high ground. I, like many others, thought that FOSS was less secure, had worse quality, and unprofitable compared to its proprietary counterpart. However, this course has shown me the complete opposite is true, and so my opinion of open source has undergone a complete one-eighty in the past eight weeks. At this point in the class, I feel as I have learned so much about open source software but have put little use of my knowledge on any FOSS project. To be honest, when looking at the production-ready code in various projects, I still feel unprepared to contribute fixes or features to these complex FOSS codebases.

My Group’s progress

My group’s(Aless and Sam) progress at this point of the project has been going through two open source projects as a group and weiging the pros and cons of each one. We have landed on a decision to fully commit to work on the open source project BitWarden which is a free password management service that has a website extension, desktop app, and mobile app to store sensitive information. We chose this project rather than others because of the amount of recent discussion and activity in issue-creation and PRs. The project also had a few “good first issues” but what intrigued us more was the community engagement shown by the vast discussion in most issues. Most of the group has made good progress in setting up the development environment in their own forked version of the project. Bitwarden has three repositories including client, mobile, and server; The client repository itself has 5 seperate workspaces for desktop, web extension, website, and cli which each have their own directions for set-up. So far only one person in our group has fully set up the dev environment but we are working together to help everyone successfully complete it.