I think the fact that free/open source came from frustration from closed-source software is kind of funny, for example, Richard Stallman’s story regarding the closed-source Xerox printer at his university lab. I think the existence of open source and its history proves that it is a sustainable economic model and was a necessary model to counteract closed-source software. During the exercise, I looked at a couple of FOSS people. Linus Torvalds was quite interesting as I did not know before that he created Linux as a hobby project to be an alternative to another popular OS at the time called MINIX. It seems like a lot of these open-source projects sometimes start out small and eventually become very big which says a lot about the contributing aspect of the open-source community which is fundamental to their constant evolution and development.

On Wednesday, we were grouped up into group of 4s and I am glad that I was able to set up a schedule with my OSSD group. We all have relatively similar schedules and plan to meet twice a week outside of class one time on Monday/Tuesday and one time on Friday. We all also can devote similar hours to the project so that was quite neat. We narrowed down to five project candidates and sci-kit learn is probably our top pick since our entire group is proficient in python. There is one groupmmate who is not as proficient in javascript which is why we are hesitant now with projects like p5.js, materialUI, shadcn-ui, etc. but I am sure we will figure it out by this week. I think the most important bit is trying to keep everyone confident about what we are about to do so we can actually make decent progress to an open source project we all care about and like. I think having that as the motivating factor definitely speeds out development a bit. I am really looking forward to full-on working post-spring break and see what we can all cook up!

In terms of personal contributions, I still try to citation hunt and edit wikipedia pages. On my excursions outside of my apartment, I try to use openstreetmap and find any data deviation in the real world and then edit them on the map with the pictures I took. I really like that OSM is real time and my edits are almost immediate. I also noticed a couple of comments on some of my OSM edits to use the right tag which is nice to see because I really wanted people to look at my edits sometimes and learn the best conventions to keep historical tags which I didn’t know before.