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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."

3 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Be sure to include..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    How to beg for money.... It will come in handy for all OSS programmers....

  2. Please discuss professionalism. by CyricZ · · Score: 1, Troll

    Please be sure to discuss professionalism, at least to some extent. A lot of open source programmers fail to realize that professionalism is necessary when running a project that seeks to be successful. There is a far greater chance that such open source software will be adopted by businesses and other serious users if the developers put forth a good image.

    For inspiration, take a look at some comments from a KOffice developer directed towards a user. Anybody who takes professionalism seriously would know that it is incorrect to insult your users in public like that. It's somewhat acceptable to point out that they might be wrong (in the KOffice developer case the user was correct, however), but it is never acceptable to resort to infantile name calling.

    So please, if you do teach this course, discuss professionalism and basic customer/user/client interaction skills. It will do the open source community a lot of good, and may very well increase the usage of projects developed by your students.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
  3. Comparison for open source by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 0, Troll

    Here's a comparison school kids might like:
    There's a girl that wants to do it with you - WITHOUT protection. Would you rather...?

    a) make sure she has no sexually transmitted diseases, or...
    b) dive in, without worrying about the consequences?

    NOTE: Assume that option a) costs no money at all.

    After this example, you can mention Internet Explorer and the attack of the spyware and viruses, and compare with Mozilla Firefox as a *practical* example of Open Source programming.