My FOSS Preferences

We are getting into the swing of the semester now - it definitely looks like it will be a busy one!



PROJECT: On Tuesday, we did some research in class to make a list of FOSS that our group is interested in. We really want to pick a project with some key characteristics:




* a project in a language we all know so that we do not get caught up on the actual programming

* a project that we understand what it is actually doing so that we can understand what can be contributed if there are no bug fixes that we can fix or documentation writing

* a project that has a thriving community so that we can have good communication with the community



We decided we would focus mostly on projects that are written in Python. We went through an entire list of software written in python, located in a .



My top 3 choices are:



1.



Django is a web framework for rapid development. On youtube, there are many video demos of this software. I think that this would be a software I could see myself being a user of, so it would be really interesting to contribute to this project as well. This project is listed as my first choice mostly because the community for Django really seems to be thriving. They have bug fix tickets tagged as 'easy', which makes me hopeful that we don't get lost in the code. A previous semester of 462 has done this project before.



2.



Scrapy is also written in Python, so it meets the first criterion. Scrapy is a web scraping tool and extract structured data from the pages. I watched videos demoing Scrapy, and it seems to be somewhat clear what it does, but a little hard to use as the actual user.



3.



I've actually used Bootstrap before on my own personal website. I used it for a top of the page navigation bar. This is the only project on my list not written in Python. It is actually written using Javascript/ jQuery and includes CSS and HTML. This is listed as my third choice since it does not meet the criterion that we set of everyone knowing the language, but I feel it ranks top in understanding what the software actually does. A previous semester of 462 has also done this project.



We started our group Wiki on Tuesday also, as well as had a group lunch to begin group forming!



READING: We started our readings for the textbook this week. The textbook we are using is SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: An Open Source Approach - Allen Tucker. The preface of this book gave reasons as to why to use FOSS, similar to the reading from the last blog post. The most interesting part of the preface to me was the goals after completing this course:



* rich appreciation for the principles and practice of FOSS Development

* byproduct of becoming a better writer and programmer

* become a skilled communicator

* become a software community member



The Chapter 1 reading focuses on software and the development process. It outlines 4 freedoms of using FOSS: freedom to use, freedom to modify, freedom to distribute, and freedom to improve. The author talks in great detail about the community that is gained in FOSS projects.
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