CSC630: The Open Source Movement // Assignments

Phillips Academy Andover  ▪  Winter 2018

Final Write-Up

Final Write-up for the course.

Quandaries of Open Source

Handout for the paper.

Open Source Project

Handout for the project.

Non Sibi Week

Description of the week.

December 13-14, 2017

  1. Find a popular open source library, and prepare to "show and tell" that library to a partner tomorrow. What would you use the library for? What does the repository consist of? Understand what it would be like to contribute to this library—what is required of contributors, what sort of issues/pull requests are you seeing for it? As you're doing this, it might be helpful to start paying attention for tomorrow night's homework.

December 12, 2017

  1. Find an issue on an open source repository not connected to our class that you could fix. This could absolutely be an improvement to documentation! You needn't fix it yet, but that will be the homework in the future, so you could go ahead and do it tonight if you wanted to.
  2. The Cathedral and the Bazaar Sections 1 through 6, approximately pages 1-16. Also, be sure to understand the impact that the essay had.

December 11, 2017

  1. Read through this guide to starting an open source project. In particular, make a list of each of the important non-code elements of making an open source repository, and why they should be present. See this issue.
  2. Read through this guide to open source licenses. It looks long, but you don't need to read the section on the author's synopses of each license (which is the longest part). But read up to that, glance through it, and then read the closing commentary.
  3. After doing the above, bookmark choosealicense.com and peruse it. This is a great tool to keep your job of licensing as simple as possible. You will likely forget which is which and need a reminder at some point in the future.
  4. Using the above two resources, be able to tell me: For the 'main 3' open source licenses (GNU GPL, Apache, MIT), describe an innocent-seeming action that would not be allowed by the license, in contrast to the other two. Also, be able to answer the question, 'what would happen if I don't bother to license my repository?'

December 8, 2017

  1. Work through this essay describing the internals of git.

December 6-7, 2017

  1. DAG and hashes worksheet
  2. Make a GitHub account (if you haven't already)
  3. Install git
  4. Work through try git—an interactive git tutorial.

December 5, 2017

  1. Listen to this podcast, and be prepared to discuss in class.
  2. Short DAG assignment

December 4, 2017

  1. Listen to this podcast, and be prepared to discuss in class.