Open Source and Computer Science Education

Today's columnist is Ralph Morelli from the Humanitarian FOSS Project. He writes:

In his March 2006 column in the Communications of the ACM, ACM President David Patterson urged Computer Science (CS) educators to "Join the open source movement." Despite the widespread use of the open source development model in the software industry, Patterson observed that "most schools still teach 'write programs from a blank piece of paper' programming."

Patterson noted that students could be inspired and attracted to CS by getting engaged in open source development projects in the real world.

That was in 2006. Today there are several college-based initiatives that have taken up Patterson's charge. This article describes three such efforts.

In January 2006 as part of an independent study project, a small group of students and faculty at Trinity College downloaded the open source Sahana disaster management system, installed it on their server, and began studying the source code. Sahana was developed in Sri Lanka by a group of volunteer programmers in the immediate aftermath of the 2004/5 Asian Tsunami. Over the next several months the Trinity group designed and built a Volunteer Management module that was incorporated into the code base in December 2006.

In addition to learning how to manage and use the tools of the typical open source development environment such as Eclipse, Sourceforge, CVS, and SVN, Trinity students also learned how to interact with programmers and developers in Sahana's development community, most of whom are based in Sri Lanka. Two students eventually went on to earn committer status in the Sahana project, thus becoming full-fledged members of the Sahana project team. You can't really get more 'real world' than that.

Building on Trinity's Sahana experience, a group of faculty at Trinity, Connecticut College, and Wesleyan University sought funding from the National Science Foundation under its CPATH (Computing Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Education) program and started the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software project (HFOSS). The project's goal is to get undergraduates engaged in building F/LOSS that benefits the public good ("humanity") as a way to help revitalize undergraduate computing education. To date, F/LOSS concepts and practices have been introduced in a variety of introductory and advanced undergraduate courses.

Since 2007 the HFOSS project has engaged undergraduates in several F/LOSS development projects, including OpenMRS and GNOME. Source code from these projects has been studied and used in courses, independent studies, capstone projects, and summer research internships. CS students have learned about the F/LOSS movement and the F/LOSS development and distribution model. And HFOSS students have made real contributions to these projects, including helping to deploy Sahana in China during the 2008 earthquake and in Haiti during the 2010 earthquake.

Reactions from HFOSS students have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic and positive. A typical sentiment expressed in course evaluations and questionnaires is: "after taking this independent study I realized that I can be in the lab, doing what I am interested in, and still make a humanitarian impact and help society."

This summer the HFOSS project will expand to several new schools, including a woman's college (Mount Holyoke College, in Hadley, MA), a community College (Bergen Community College, in Bergen, NJ), and a traditionally black college (North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC). The goal is to be able to provide summer internship opportunities to students around the country, getting them engaged in building software that serves their communities -- a kind of Computing for America.

A second project that is helping promote open source education is TeachingOpenSource.org (TOS). TOS was established in March 2009 "to serve as neutral collaboration point for everyone involved in Teaching Open Source." Lively discussions on TOS's mailing list focus on open source education models, funding opportunities, community relations, and other issues. A group of TOS participants led by Greg DeKonigsberg of Red Hat has just finished a new textbook: Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How to be Productively Lost, the Open Source Way. The book is freely available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.

TOS is also sponsoring a number of week-long immersion experiences for CS faculty. Several POSSEs (Professor Open Source Summer Experience) are being planned this year at Worcester State University, RIT, CMU, and elsewhere. And through TOS's efforts there will be an Education Track at this year's OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) in Portland, OR in July.

In addition to HFOSS and TOS, open source projects and centers are springing up at other colleges. The Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software has started a number of FOSS development projects that are used to anchor classes in computer science and other disciplines. The Center's goal is to support "the development of open software solutions to promote civil societies in the United States and around the globe."

Rochester Institute of Technology has the FOSS@RIT initiative, which hosts an One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) users group and focuses on educational game development. At the University of Waterloo, the Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP) brings together undergraduates at several universities in Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on open source capstone projects. This term, participants from nine different schools in Canada and the U.S. are collaborating on seven different F/LOSS development projects.

As these examples show, there is a growing interest in F/LOSS within academia. It is estimated that students make up around 30% of contributors to F/LOSS projects. CS faculty are beginning to recognize that it's time to incorporate the F/LOSS model into the undergraduate curriculum. While CS educators are still well short of Patterson's call to "join the open source movement" things are clearly headed in the right direction.

Cloud Solutions

The April issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Cloud Solutions" and the authors include:

David Linthicum is the CTO of Bick Group, an author, and thought leader on cloud computing. Dave's article starts with a discussion on the causes of the shift to cloud computing. He then clarifies the meaning of the broad term of cloud computing by identifying its key characteristics, different deployment models, and various components. Dave finishes with an important discussion on the value and economics of the cloud.

Fred Waldner is an independent consultant and a Certified Professional Project Manager. His article discusses how the shift to cloud computing mirrors the same challenges that we witnessed with the shift to enterprise adoption of the Internet in the 1990s. He identifies some of the adoption obstacles that must be overcome.

Daniel Crenna is an award winning developer, author, and active entrepreneur. Daniel articulates the value of open source in hosted solutions as companies adopt cloud computing. He examines the reasons why companies use established open source software or give away their proprietary code as the seeds of new open source projects.

Ronald Schmelzer is a Managing Partner at ZapThink LLC. His article addresses the debate about private clouds. There are many companies that are afraid of deploying critical applications and/or data in a public cloud environment. Instead, many are contemplating building their own internal cloud which goes against much of the value proposition of cloud computing and keeps their dependency on expensive commercial software. Ron argues that the concept of private clouds is a marketing term used by vendors rebranding their products.

Tom Lounibos, CEO for SOASTA, discusses how the pay-as-you-go cloud computing model allows SOASTA to simulate performance tests with loads that were simply not feasible in the on-premise world. Low cost, on-demand cloud computing services allow companies to deploy more reliable and scalable solutions because they can now afford to test peak loads and fix bottlenecks before they happen in the production environment.

John Crupi is CTO and Chris Warner is Vice President of Marketing at JackBe Corporation. Previous articles discuss how the lower levels of the stack are becoming a commodity and that IT's focus should be on business functionality. John and Chris provide some examples of how organizations are leveraging mashups to aggregate data from various locations into composite applications.

The editorial theme for the upcoming May issue of the OSBR is Communications Enablement and the guest editor will be Chris McPhee. Submissions are due by April 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

There is More than Code in Open Source

Today's columnist is Carlo Daffara, the Italian member of the European Working group on libre software. He writes:

Even among researchers, when you talk about “contributions” to open source software you invariably talk about code. Packages, patches, lines of code, whatever: code. In my view, this is quite restrictive, and it is important to start to think about all the possible contributions that are outside of pure code, and how to incent these contributions within projects.

When we think about an open source project, what types of contributions can we find? During a presentation, Aaron Seigo of the KDE project discussed these:

• artwork


• documentation


• human-computer interaction


• marketing


• quality assurance


• software development


• translation

Software development is one of the aspects, but not the only one. After all, if the software is ugly, few people will use it. If it does not work in your language, you may find it less useful, and so on.

Matthias Mueller of the Open Office project published an interesting graph with a similar story. The graph shows the number of active participants in each OpenOffice.org project, with each area proportional to the number of committers. In other words, the larger the area, the more people are active in that area of contribution. The yellow area on the left is related to code, while the coloured part on the right is related to everything else. If you look carefully, you will find that the number of people working on the code aspect is less than the “non-code” part!

In a report published in 2006, one of the project managers of OpenCascade.org (a sophisticated library and toolset designed to create computer aided design (CAD) systems, based on the commercial CAD sold by Matra Datavision) published an interview. Among other things, it stated: “In the year 2000, fifty outside contributors to Open Cascade provided various kinds of assistance: transferring software to other systems (IRIX 64 bits, Alpha OSF), correcting defects (memory leaks…) and translating the tutorial into Spanish, etc. Currently, there are seventy active contributors and the objective is to reach one hundred. These outside contributions are significant. Open Cascade estimates that they represent about 20% of the value of the software.”

The reality is that non-code contributions are significant, and should be encouraged in any possible way. In your open source software project, create a place to help those that are willing to give you more than source code, because that value will get lost if not properly collected. Even small things, like knowing that the code is used by someone, is a positive contribution.

In the next column, I will talk about possible strategies projects can use to improve non-code participation.

Startups

The February issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "startups" and the authors include:

Lisa Torjman and Jon Worren from MaRS, an innovation hub for Canadian science and technology startups, discuss why Canada needs to invest in and nurture a culture of entrepreneurship in order to create successful startups.

Mekki MacAulay, principal at OSStrategy.org, highlights special considerations and pitfalls for open source startups and discusses how startups can use an open source strategy to gain competitive advantage.

Tony Bailetti, Director of Ontario's Talent First Network, describes nine companies located in Canada’s National Region and identifies how their founders benefit from the Lead to Win business ecosystem.

William Stewart, CEO of ESERI, describes one startup's experience in integrating open source software into a complete turn-key solution.

Harley Finkelstein, a serial entrepreneur, answers the question "Which is the better path to take, as a push or a pull startup?".

As always, we encourage readers to share articles of interest with their colleagues, and to provide their comments either online or directly to the authors.

The editorial theme for the upcoming March issue of the OSBR is Mobile and the guest editors will be Thomas Kunz and Francois Lefebvre. Submissions are due by February 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

Don't forget to visit the website every Friday to check out each week's column. The columnists for February include Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD, Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, Van Lindberg, author of Intellectual Property and Open Source, and Emma Jane Hogbin of HickTech.

Women in Open Source

The June issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "women in open source" and the authors include:

Rikki Kite of Linux Pro Magazine discusses the editorial theme.

Cathy Malmrose, CEO of ZaReason, introduces women who make a variety of contributions to open source from all corners of the world. She also shares interviews with Belinda Lopez, Training Project Manager for Canonical; Brenda Wallace, well-know blogger from New Zealand; and Andreia Gaita, Mono/Moonlight developer from Portugal.

Cat Allman, Developer Relations Specialist for the Open Source Programs Office at Google, discusses Google's efforts to reach out to the F/LOSS community, and she talks about their efforts to mentor high school and college students through the Google Highly Open Participation Contest and Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

Angela Byron, Senior Web Consultant at Lullabot and former GSoC participant, explains how fostering a healthy community around open source projects leads to better code.

Emma Jane Hogbin, Web developer and consultant, shares her experience with giving back to the community and explains how it is helping her open source business expand and gain new revenue streams.

Audrey Eschright, developer for Elevated Code and co-chair of the Open Source Bridge conference, offers an example of how to organize an open source project to encourage community development, and she suggests some tools that can make collaboration easier.

Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, provides an overview of the community around the foundation and offers a look toward the future of the GNOME desktop environment.

Melanie Groves VonFange, an open source advocate, uses BSD as an example when looking at what role open source advocacy plays in increasing open source usage.

Selena Deckelmann, PostSQL specialist and co-chair of the Open Source Bridge conference, tells how the Portland open source community has increased participation by women and how other communities can benefit from their experiences.

Amanda McPherson, Vice President of Marketing and Developer Programs of the Linux Foundation, asks "So Are You a Contributor?". She also talks about Linux Foundation efforts to encourage a culture of inclusion.

March Issue of OSBR Available

The March issue of the Open Source Business Resource is now available in HTML and PDF formats. The theme this month is "Geospatial" and the articles and authors include:

Paul Ramsay, a Senior Consultant with OpenGeo, examines how geospatial open source provides an example of the market challenges of a mid-sized vertical market.

Tyler Mitchell, Executive Director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, discusses the factors needed to get open source geospatial products into the hands of users, the value of marketing open source projects, and the advantages provided by an open source ecoystem.

Mark Lucas, a principal scientist at RadiantBlue Technologies Inc., and Scott Bortman, system architect and primary developer for the OMAR web processing system, introduce the OMAR web based system for archival, retrieval, processing, and distribution of geospatial assets.

Andrew Ross, a Director within the Engineering team at Ingres, provides a primer on geospatial technology and discusses some of the lessons learned from Ingres' geospatial open source project.

Haris Kurtagic, General Manager and Founder of SL-King, and Geoff Zeiss, Director of Technology at Autodesk, introduce a standards-based framework for providing geospatial web services.

The editorial theme for the upcoming April issue of the OSBR is "Open APIs" and the guest editor will be Michael Weiss from Carleton University. Contact me if you're interested in a submission.

February Issue of OSBR Available

The February issue has just been published. In this issue:

Tony Bailetti from Carleton University contributes a tool to measure the strength of a business model and shows how open source can be used to strengthen market offers' business models.

Peter Carbone, a veteran executive who specializes in ICT strategy and commercialization, highlights the relevance of new business models and ecosystems in the knowledge-era economy.

Edy Ferreira and Stoyan Tanev from Carleton University describe the ways companies make money from market offers that rely on open source hardware projects.

David A. Wheeler, a software developer and technical author, argues that there are two types of commercial software: proprietary software and F/LOSS.

Jennifer Bell introduces VisibleGovernment.ca and describes why open government data is a valuable investment in Canada's infrastructure.

Mike Kavis answers the question "How can an individual or small business give back to an open source community?".

As always, we encourage readers to share articles of interest with their colleagues, and to provide their comments either online or directly to the authors. We hope you enjoy this issue of the OSBR.

The editorial theme for the upcoming March issue of the OSBR is Geospatial and the guest editor will be Dave McIlhagga, CEO of DM Solutions.

Videos on Open Source

The Free and Open Source Software Learning Center (FOSSLC) is starting to get a nice collection of videos regarding open source topics. Other practical things provided by this organization include:

* Provide free events that teach skills using open source.

* Facilitate open source related networking and colaboration between industry, academia, and government.

* Offer course material to assist Colleges and Universities to teach using open source.

* Aggregate news and event feeds from other open source projects and communities.

* Support research and internship projects using open source.

* Promote international connections between projects and institutions.

* Provide infrastructure, governance, and energy to promote development in our ecosystem.

The Evolution of Open Source Software

Tristan Rhodes has an interesting post on the trend of proprietary vendors becoming more open and open source vendors becoming more closed. As stated, "The line between these categories is going to become very blurred as they converge around a common middle-ground."

Open Source is not a Business Model

While the report of that name is only available for purchase, a summary of its findings is available from this blog entry.

The two findings I found most interesting were:

1. “Open source is a business tactic, not a business model. Open source is not a market in and of itself, nor is it a vertical segment of the market. Open source is a software development and/or distribution model that is enabled by a licensing tactic.”


2. “There is very little money being made out of open source software that doesn’t involve proprietary software and services.”

Day 1 of FSOSS 08

I blogged each of the sessions I attended today at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) taking place at Seneca College, York campus. Here I've added some notes which may be of interest to OSBR readers.

The first session was moderated by Mark Surman who co-authored Open Sourcing Social Change: Inside the Constellation Model for the September issue.

The second session provides an excellent update to the December 2007 article A Rallying Moment for Canadian Open Source Software.

The third session provides an inside look into the lessons learned by a company who released an open source version of their proprietary product.

The fourth and fifth sessions provide many insights from academics, industry, students, and members of open source projects on the benefits of partnering and what more needs to be done to increase the number and quality of these partnerships.

Commercial Open Source

While the term open source is becoming mainstream, there still is confusion regarding why some companies choose to pay their employees to work on open source projects or release some of their own products as open source. How exactly does contributing resources to something "free" help the bottom line?

This blog entry from Cleversafe compares the emerging field of dispersed storage with the open nature of the TCP/IP protocols. It also outlines their business model which includes commercial offerings as well as contributions to the open source ecosystem they established. Their model seems to be working as yesterday the Wall Street Journal awarded the company with a 2008 Innovation Award in the Software category for its innovative approach to storing and archiving digital content.

Many of the articles in the OSBR provide some insight into why companies contribute to open source. In the most recent issue, Nortel's CTO describes some of the many open source projects that receive Nortel contributions, including OLPC, Hyperconnectivity, Open802.11s, SIPfoundry, and Curriki. We'll be seeing more articles like these in the upcoming editorial themes of "Building Community" (October 2008), "Enterprise Participation" (January 2009) and "Commercialisation" (February 2009).