[TOS] blog post on getting students involved in open source

[Mel Chua]

On 09/09/2011 03:40 PM, Bonnie MacKellar wrote:
> Mark Guzdial’s blog on computer science education has a somewhat
> negative post today on the usefulness of involving undergrads in open
> source development.

Guzdial has posted similar sentiments about open source development 
before; see 
http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/72144-the-impact-of-open-source-on-computing-education/fulltext 
for Guzdial's older blog post, 
http://opensource.com/education/10/2/open-source-dangerous-computing-education 
for Greg's response, and http://lwn.net/Articles/374675/ for more 
reactions from the FOSS community.

My take: no, the world's not perfect, and neither is open source, but 
hey, neither is any school or company or job, and you need to "bust 
through" to get quality mentoring time no matter what you're doing 
where. Students had better be prepared for an imperfect world. 
Brokenness and politics and "inner circles" exist in any human 
institution; at least in the FOSS world you can *see* that dirty laundry 
better, pull it out and talk about it -- at the very least, overhear the 
conversations between "senior people" while you're figuring out how to 
participate in those same conversations.

Haters gonna hate. If FOSS works for you, use it. If it doesn't, don't. 
It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness -- and my 
favorite thing about this group is that we *do* light candles. No 
criticism can diminish that or take it away.

--Mel