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."

Comments

Fundementals

[rovingeyes]

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.

Re:Fundementals

[chris macura]

Lecture 1: OSS. What is it, where is it, and why is it.
Lecture 2: Types of licenses, when to use which.
Lecture 3: How to modify the licenses to allow for various common changes
Lecture 4: Writing documentation: intro to man-pages (how to write them), doxygen, and latex
Lecture 5: Writing readable code: commenting, dependencies, and the merits of white-space
Lecture 6: How to use OSS in CSS (closed-source software), when it may/may not be done.
Lecture 7: How to use versioning systems: CVS, SVN, etc.
Lecture 8: -+
              9: +-- Communication Skills: technical writing (not the bullshit they teach you in english 101)
            10: -+
Lecture 11: Survey of existing projects: why they succedded or failed
Lecture 12: ditto

That should cover it. I'm guessing a one/two credit course.

Re:Fundementals

[greginnj]

What else you ask?
Uhhh, I just thought of an important one. What about "how to make money?"

On this point, I think the example of Zope is illustrative. Investor Hadar Pedhazur was willing to pony up venture capital to fund Zope Corporation, on the condition that they open-source Zope. I'm not really a Zope fan, but the idea of an investor requiring a company to open-source their principal asset struck me as a hard-dollar vote for the value of OSS.

See this for refs:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/ZopeBook/IntroducingZope. html ("Zope History" section)

More detail:

http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stori es/1999/05/24/focus4.html

IT Law

[daveed]

OSS isn't strictly an IT issue. It's a rights issue. Who owns software? software design? concepts? ideas? thoughts? This sounds like what I should have been taught in our semester of IT Law (As apposed to the far too specific individual legal cases to do with Data Protection Act (still very interesting though)). If you were to take this class. A major part of the course would have to be the GPL. This has to be the most clear cut academic outline of OSS. In short... Very good idea :)

Get Involved

[Acius]

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.

Ernest T Bass Quote

[pin_gween]

What would you want to see in an OSS class?

Girls

Lesson One.

[GeneralEmergency]

Lecture:
Microsoft is Evil(TM).

Review:
Microsoft is Evil(TM).

Test:
Microsoft is ______________.

A) Evil(TM)
B) Mostly Evil with nice pockets here and there.
C) Not very Evil.
D) All of the above.