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What Makes an OSS Class Work?
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."
May be I am naive, but what else would you discuss in an OSS class except philosophy, legal, ethical and practicality arguments behind OSS? As far as I am concerned, it doesn't matter what programming language background the student has; because OSS class should not be about programming but every thing else surrounding it. For e.g. copyright law and how it relates to OSS, what are different OSS licenses and why are there so many? How can one create their own license and still maintain the spirit of OSS? And frankly the most important question this class should address is - WHY OSS?. I believe that between all the hoopla surrounding OSS, people have stopped asking the fundemental question.
Also, SourceForge
Basic tools. Source code management, build systems.
Leadership techniques about getting people to work with you when you aren't paying them and can't fire them.
Agile Artisans
If you're talking to computer science students, it might be a good idea to have them research an OSS project they like and contribute something to it. I think a lot of students are pro-OSS in theory, but haven't taken the time to actually get their hands dirty with real, live code. If you require them to find and do some work on an existing project then they get valuable experience in researching what's out there, familiarizing themselves with existing community gathering points, etc.
True, a lot of the code they contribute will suck, but that's nothing new. And if they keep trying, they'll get better at it.
Acius the unfamous
2) Coding Standards! I think that good coding standards and commenting are especially important in an OSS project.
3) Using OSS tools: If the student is going to become as OSS programmer, then they really need to know how to use CVS, Bugzilla, etc, etc. I am sure you can come up with a good list of the things a developer needs.
4) Walk the students through setting up Linux, and using its basic functions (grep, etc) and its programming tools (gcc, make, etc). Go over the very, very basic stuff. I programmed for a while in a Wintel inviro in college before getting into an AIX system. It was a shock, and the prof seemed to think that we (me and the other students) had been programming in Unix before. It took me some time to get used to using to tools for development in Unix. Today, you probably also need to go over some command line stuff. I remember it not being that big of a deal, since I was used to DOS. I bet a lot of student today have never used DOS, or it was a long time ago.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
... most OSS dev's couldn't give a fuck about their users...
And that's fine! But then those same developers shouldn't wonder why their product fails to get used by governments, businesses, educators and other serious software users.
Now while a lone developer may not care if their email fetching program becomes widely used, it's often the opposite for larger projects.
It's particularly sad when one rogue developer who publically throws out insults is able to tarnish the reputation, painstakingly built up by many people over many years, of a project like KOffice or KDE.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'd really let them have a go at python, it's a great language and allows for RAD of pretty much any kind of application, can talk to virtually everything that talks back easily and well.. google uses it for a great amount of projects which at the moment speaks for itself.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
OSS is about licensing. Period. While the subject may make a good topic for one class session in a larger course, an entire course devoted to it is overkill. It would be like having an entire class on "Shareware". In other words, pointless.
Instead, teach a class on Linux or BSD device drivers, or Unix system architecture, or Xorg programming, or LAMP, or Python scripting, etc., etc.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned