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

C. Titus Brown ctb at msu.edu
Thu Sep 15 02:31:21 UTC 2011


On Fri, Sep 09, 2011 at 11:12:35PM -0400, Mel Chua wrote:
> 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.

Speaking as an educator and a reasonably active open source developer
both (in the Python world) I would say that Mark's take is reasonably
accurate and common, and for many of the reasons mentioned on this list.

What I'd like to add, though, is that some communities are making an
effort to be more open and accessible in this way.  I would suggest
viewing Mark's blog post a bit more charitably as an observation and
not an attack, and also as pointing out a mismatch in the existing model of
education relative to "common" OSS development rather than as a statement
of futility for the whole enterprise.

Quoting from his post,

"""
These results suggest that undergrads doing OSS for a course are still
providing a service and are likely still gaining good experience working on a
larger code base, but they’re unlikely to become part of the established
developer community. 
"""

...I don't understand why this statement is being viewed so negatively...
It's kind of unreasonable to expect many (or even any) students to really
participate on a full, complex OSS project based on a class experience.
But showing them what exists out there is important.

cheers,
--t
-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu


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