Open-Source Software Past and Present

In my first blog post, I commented on how I was inspired by the founders, contributors, and maintainers of FOSS. To me, they were of course contentious and opionionated, but led arguably the most important software movement. Linux, GNU, OpenCV, Pytorch, Tensorflow, etc. have completely shaped software as we know it today– something closed-source may have never been able to achieve.

This week in class, we went over more individuals who have directly made FOSS waht it is today. My group was assigned Brian Behlendorf, someone who I wasn’t familiar with prior to looking him up but was aware of his main contribution: Apache Web Server. Apache Web Server, as the name suggests, is a web server software responsible for the early growth and continued ubiquity of the World Wide Web. Websites hosted on Apache were faster and lighter and the server was more feature-packed. Brian Behlendorf, like many other early Open Source contributors, is opinionated and outspoken. He has served as a technology advisor to the Obama administration in 2008, serves on the board of the Mozilla foundation, and was the General Manager of the Open Source Security Foundation. To me it seems like he lives and breathes Open Source and embodies the self-starter nature of the Open Source movement.

Group B

This week we were assigned our groups for our big Open Source contribition. Thankfully, things have gone relatively smoothly. To my surprise, we’ve narrowed down our projects to Bitwarden and Nuclear. Bitwarden is a password management platform I thought would be too difficult to contribute to. Luckily, their issues pages has some doable problems and their community seems helpful. Nuclear is a small, free-music streaming platform in its early stages with plenty of low-hanging issues. However, the community is small and there isn’t much discussion. I believe we’re leaning towards Bitwarden however we plan on making the final decision soon.