[TOS] new chapters for Practical OSS Exploration textbook

Heidi Ellis heidijcellis at gmail.com
Wed Aug 25 13:20:59 UTC 2010


Hi Folks,

Other areas for addition to the text are aimed at the next level of
contribution, once the developer gets up to speed on FOSS. These are along
the lines of software engineering topics such as:

Requirements - How do you determine the exact requirements of a feature or
enhancement? How do you do this in an open environment where users may be
developers and there may be conflict in desired functionality? How do you
document these? 

Design - How do you determine the overall design of a project? How do you
determine how your piece fits into the overall design? How do you document
this? What are good design practices that result in good code?

Test - How do you ensure that your patch/enhancement/bug fix is correct?
Organized approaches to testing. 

These are topics that I'd like to talk about in my Software Engineering
course that are not directly covered in the text. 

Just a thought. 
Heidi

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org
[mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Karsten Wade
Sent: Monday, August 23, 2010 7:51 PM
To: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: [TOS] new chapters for Practical OSS Exploration textbook

When we were at OSU talking about the 'Practical OSS Exploration'
textbook, Tim Budd made a comment that I paraphrase as: "This material is
good but there isn't enough to teach more than two weeks."

What's missing, as we discussed, is all the material that gives a more full
picture of participation in a FOSS community.  What we have right now is
very task oriented learning, so you could sit down and read through/conduct
the exercises within that few weeks.

What I imagine we need are topics that provide broader information and
invite discussion, contemplation, and thought change.  Such as:

* History - what are things like now and how did things get to be this
  way?

* Community cultures - different types of communities and how they
  interact.  Explanation of communities of practice.

* Open communities and diversity - there are significant disparities
  and non-trivial problems, some of what and why.

* Licensing the Code - concepts about copyright, copyleft, different
  types of licenses, and effects of those choices on the code and
  community.

* Threats and risks to and from FOSS - review of what can go wrong and
  consequences; what FUD is and how it's handled.  What people forget
  and do wrong all the time.

* Open for Business - Free software, open source software, and
  business.  Different business models around FOSS to the present.

* Who else practices the open source way - how open source has
  influenced other disciplines in terms of core principles (NOT using
  software but contribution cultures).

Sources for this content:  Wikipedia and other CC licensed sources;
theopensourceway.org; original content production.

Other ideas?  Expansions?

- Karsten
--
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41




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