Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Reflections on Open Source in Today's World

Why isn't open source hot among computer science students?

This article strives to address misconceptions held by those who are new to the computer science field. The author surveyed 26 attendees of a hack-a-thon for high school and college aged programmers. Personally, I believe this is too small of a sample, but I found my self agreeing with the points she makes. First she points out that novice programmers would rather work on their own projects than contribute to an open source project. When I was a freshman and software, I had several small projects which were nothing more than toys. I could have learned a lot more my attempting to contribute to an open source project. The author also points out that many new programmers do not feel that their skills are up to snuff. Contributing to a an open source project is intimidating and it can be difficult to figure out what is the best way to contribute early on. However, I have noticed that many open source projects are welcoming and have easier tasks set aside for on-boarding new developers. The last point the author makes is that young programmers often believe proprietary software is simply better than open source software. This is not true and its easy to point to examples like Firefox to show what open source is capable of. I am relatively new to open source, but I hope to contribute to open source projects in some capacity for a long time to come.

Can anonymity and accountability coexist?

The author starts by pointing out how anonymous communicative has always existed outside of the internet such as whistle-blowing, voting, and crowd sourcing. These forms of communication can lead to a more open flow of ideas. This thought is continued in the authors first example of reddit (my favorite website) allowing the free flow of creative and imaginative ideas through anonymity. However, as a regular user of the site, I have seen how anonymity has allowed the flow of dangerous or malicious ideas that would never be shared outside a cloak of anonymity. The author points out that there often is a lack of accountability. The author believes there should be other forms of non-anonymous communication to go along side anonymous communication channels.

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