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What Makes an OSS Class Work?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the knowing-is-half-the-battle dept.

AnimalCoward writes "I teach a Continuing Education courses in OO programming at our local state university. An email was just sent out from the program director asking if any instructors were interested in developing, and teaching, a course in OSS. My question to the slashdot crowd is: What would you want to see in an OSS class? What should be included? Should I bring up all the discussions about liability and multiple OSS licenses? The request didn't state it, but from experience I believe the students would have a programming background ranging from only mainframes to C++ to those with some Java experience."

5 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Other aspects by m2pc · · Score: 4, Informative

    It would be nice to cover the aspects mentioned in the previous replies, but having some instruction on how to get started with OSS (SourceForge, using CVS, etc.) would also be helpful.

  2. Göteborg University course by tcopeland · · Score: 4, Informative
    Their school of economics has a course on Open Source/Free Software. Here's the summary:
    The purpose of this course is to study the philosophical foundations and theories that have developed in the open source/free software field. Beginning with a historical view of the developments in theory and philosophy the course participants will continue their study of the phenomenon and also be given the opportunity to discuss the new issues these development philosophies have given rise to. Additionally the question of whether these same theories and philosophies can be applied in other fields of intellectual endeavour aside from programming.
    Sounds like nifty stuff, although not much in the way of actually fiddling with open source code. I guess it depends on what aspect of OSS you're trying to focus on...
    --
    The Army reading list
  3. Re:Be sure to include..... by rovingeyes · · Score: 4, Informative

    Even though you are trying to sound funny, I think two sections - "How to sell an idea" and "How to develop a business plan" will probably be invaluable. The key to success of an OSS is how much you can get funding in VC and how long you can keep them happy. Obviously this means profiting from the business model surrounding the product. So not only do you have to be a good at marketing yourself or the product, but you should have some business sense to make that project a success.

  4. A lot of small topics by AuMatar · · Score: 4, Informative

    It seems there's a lot of amll 1 lecture topics, but not many big huge things

    *philosophy of OSS, and OSS vs Free Software
    *Differences between the major licenses (GPL, LGPL, BSD)
    *Major OSS successes
    *OSS development tools (sourceforge, gcc, ddd, etc)
    *A project where they fix a bug in an open source program of their choice (or add a feature), and submit it to the maintainer.
    *OSS buisness models

    Other than actually coding some open source software, there's really not much I can see teaching to make it a whole class.

    --
    I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
  5. Re:Fundementals by j1m+5n0w · · Score: 4, Informative
    To that, I might suggest adding
    • how to write portable code
    • how to use make/autoconf in a portable way
    • how to create packages (rpm, deb, tar.gz, etc)
    • how to submit your packages for inclusion in various distros, and how to make things easy for distro maintainers
    • how to obtain feedback from users (bugzilla, mailing lists, forums, wikis, etc...)