Group Presentations

Last week, we’ve presented our experience contributing to Godot to our class. As we prepared our presentations, I’ve realized that the contributions we’ve had for the duration of this class was a very good way for us to get into the Godot ecosystem and familiarize ourselves with using the engine, but I feel like we still have a long way to go to be truly reap the fruits of our work, and make more impactful contributions. I hope to continue using Godot and become a more active member in the community.

As for other presentations, it was nice to hear about the experience of other groups. I found GitLab group’s presentation to be very interesting, mainly because their experience was the complete opposite of what I’d expect with little I knew about GitLab before. Compared to most other open source projects, GitLab seems more complicated and harder to get into, I was surprised to learn that the Gitlab team was very helpful and made it easy for newcomers to get into the project. I guess the takeaway is that the quality of help, be it through contribution guides, responsiveness to the questions, etc, is a better determinant of successful contributions than choosing a project that is not very complicated.

Open Source And …

It was interesting to participate in the discussion about open source projects that wasn’t necessarily software. One project that piqued my interest was open source sports, the project where they define rules for sports. However, I realized that some of the rules they put up for soccer was incorrect, I opened an issue about it. Also, I’ve found various open source recipe projects to be interesting, these could be a good way of keeping the information available, leveling the playing field between small businesses who like to make their own cola, or beer, and big corporations who’d like keep their recipes secret.

The Cathedral and The Bazaar

My favorite quote from The Cathedral and The Bazaar was “If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.”. I believe that the having the right mindset is one of the most important things when it comes to success and hapiness. The way I interpreted the “right attitude” was approaching problems from a place of curiosity and opennes to new experiences. Given that Linux started as a hobby project for Torvalds, it’s obvious that he was coming from a place of curiosity.

Tidepool and Stallman’s Printer

What’s stood out to me about Tidepool is that the problem they are fixing is a larger scale, more crucial version of Stallman’s printer problem. You are given a device, in this case blood glucose monitors and insulin pumps as opposed to a printer, and you can’t hack the device, or access the data it generates. The only difference is that for Stallman this was simply an inconvenience, but for diabetes patients, this problem can affect their health in a major way. The importance of being able to ‘hack’ into devices and having access to your data is tremendous, especially in the healthcare industry.

Tidepool being set up as non profit sets them in a very good position to utilize open source. Since they don’t have to answer to shareholders, they are able to put the mission of the organization first, and as an organization that aims to give access to the data of diabetes patients, it makes sense for them to have all their software as open source.

Open Source In The Industry

The primary motivator behind decisions of firms, especially publicly traded ones, is profits. Other considerations such as the philosophical viewpoints on the nature of software or providing goods and services that benefit all can only be considered if there are enough profits to satisfy shareholders in the first place.

Thus the industry will accept open source so far as it aligns with their profit making goals. This is why the nature of the technology matters a lot too. If it’s used by many businesses, it’ll get a lot of indusrty support and funding behind it, if not it’ll have a hard time getting financing.

During the spring break, I had attended the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I went to some talks about open source and I visited some open source related booths at the Expo as well.

One thing to note was how big of a space Godot had. This year, the space they had rented at the expo was even bigger than Unity’s.

Thoughts on FOSS & Richard Stallman

I’m a huge proponent of the idea of sharing information and improving together with the people around you as opposed to seeing them as competition. So the idea of just sharing software freely deeply resonates with me.

However, I disagree with Richard Stallman’s free & open source absolutism. There are a lot of benefits to FOSS, and some software should indeed be free, but not all.

This week, we’ve evaluated various open source projects to get a sense of what it would be like to contribute to them.

I was able to find some projects that were of interest to me. I’ve liked Cockatrice, the program that let’s play card game over a multiplayer network. Another interesting project was inkscape, the drawing tool. However it was a little hard for me to get a good sense of the project because they use GitLab, which is a platform I don’t have a lot of familiarity in.

Open Source in Medicine

This week we’ve watched videos on how technology, and open source software in particular can solve some of the problems we face. I’ve watched the videos related to healthcare. One was about devices that could measure insulin levels and give access to the data, and the other was about patients having access to the notes doctors take about them. In both cases, having access to one’s own health data is critical.

This week we’ve received some suggestoion to our project. I think they were useful suggestions overall and some people even made new pull requests based on these suggestions. We’ve merged their pr’s recently and updated the extension page on firefox to include their contributions.

What I’ve really liked about this is that with almost no effort from our part, we’ve got two issues fixed. The popup size was changing when switching between focus and break modes, and now it’s fixed. Also, we’ve renamed the switch button to change between ‘break’ and ‘focus’ based on the mode, this way it’s easier to understand what the button does.

I’ve found a very well written code of conduct document recently. It’s so elequently organized and detailed that I’ve wanted to share it.

Here’s the link for it: github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/CODE-OF-CONDUCT.md

This week we’re creating an open source firefox add-on, this not only means the license is public (MIT license) but also we provide guidance to others on how they can contribute to our project.

The most surprising thing about this project was how simple and streamlined was the extension creation process is. I think mozilla really provides us a simple way to interact with the browser so we can focus on actually building the extension and not on plumbing.

As humans, I think it’s important that we provide work places that foster healthy communication where contributors can focus on improving the project in an harrasment free environment. I think code of conduct is a tool that is in the right direction for providing this kind of environment, although it’s limited.

It is a guiding light, nothing more. It’s up to the maintainers to stay faitful to that guiding light. Ultimately, what determines the experience of the people in the community is maintainers’ determination in upholding the values listed in the code of conduct.

When I think about the term open source, I think about being free to use or modify the tool, just like how we can use math for any purpose we want. Pythagoras holds no copyright over the equation a² + b² = c². That’s the type of freedom that comes to mind when I think about the term “open source.”

However, I’ve chosen this class for pragmatic reasons. I think I would be a better programmer if I gained experience working in a large codebase written by many people. So far, most of my coding experience has been in projects written only by me or a couple of people. However, programming has an important collaborative aspect; I need more experience in that regard.

Nice Open Source Projects

Godot

Godot is the leading open-source game engine, and it’s rapidly gaining popularity due to its extensible design, relatively easy learning curve, and powerful rendering support.