Diving into Open Source

This Spring I decided to take this course called Open Source Software Development. I had no prior experience contributing to open source projects, but I knew it was something that greatly interested me. I have been the beneficiary of open source projects in the past, using libraries, modifying code for my use, so I wanted to dive deeper into everything related into Open Source and hopefully be a contributing member of the community.

My thoughts on Open Source

When I think of Open Source, I used to just think of a github repository that many people contributed to. The benefits of open source was a community that could share ideas, build on them, and have all sorts of people from anywhere in the world create innovative transparent products that one person or organization simply could not come up with/make. Potential problems may arrise from anyone being able to modify or change code, but the community often fixes malicious vunerablities and bugs simply becuase so many people can view and edit the code.

However, through just one day of class, I learned that open source is much more than just a collaborative repository. It is a whole movement, an entire culture, a phillosophy with its own manifesto and ideals. It involves leagalese, community, and much more than just push and pull requests on github. What is suprising to me is that it doenst even have to be code!

Open Source in my life

As a CS major, I think it is impossible to go through your career and education without using open source at all. Here are my top 4 open source projects that I use/impact me the most:

• Langchain

  This is a python library that I used extensivly in my previous internships and personal projects. I have looked into the documentation and source code extensively, and I find it very useful with AI

• Postgres

  This relational database system is very useful, and I have used it myself many times.

• OpenAI Embeddings Project

  I got a lot of help and inspiration from this specific project, using an LLM to search and analyse documents

• React.js

  This javascript library is something I have recently been learning, and I find it very enjoyable