The Cathedral and the Bazaar

The situation that Eric Raymond describes in the beginning of his essay seems familiar: A programmer becomes interested in enhancing some small aspect of a project and eventually winds up involved in the whole thing. While his story about his own development strengths and weaknesses and the charisma a leader has to have to get a project going is somewhat interesting, the later half of the essay is more so. It describes how once a project reaches a critical mass of developers, people will code for it because they enjoy contributing something to the community. While each individual programmer may want to work on a certain problem that interests them, I think the desire to contribute ensures that they also work on whatever part of the project needs attention. I think that the essay accurately addresses, in broad terms, several important principles that make the open source community work.

Working on Banshee

The first order of business after selecting Banshee as our project was to log into the IRC channel. There seem to be between 50 and 70 people there most of the time. There usually isn't very much conversation in the main channel unless someone asks a question, but then people are quick to answer. It is good to know that they will be available to help us as we get acquainted with this project.

The mailing list also seems very active, with a few new messages almost every day. The messages are usually about new bugs that have been found or progress on fixing old ones. It is encouraging that there seem to be lot of developers making substantial contributions to the project.

Banshee

In the last class my team decided to work on the program Banshee, which is a media manager and music player. It is written in C#. I have some experience with C and have begun studying how C# differs from it. Banshee has an official IRC channel and an extensive bug list, which should both be helpful.

Picking a project

In class Thursday my team worked on picking a project for the semester. We are all familiar with Java and some of us have experience in C, so at first we looked for projects in those languages. But eventually we decided that we are all capable of learning a new language fairly quickly, and what was most important in a project was the amount of documentation available and the willingness of the team to cooperate with new members. Since then, we have all be researching projects in more depth. My favorite is Amarok; ( http://amarok.kde.org/ ) a music player and media manager. Every project on the list my teammates and I made looks promising, though.

First Post

The first day of class was primarily spent forming a team that I will be working on an HFOSS (Humanitarian Free Open Source Software) project with this semester. This process was familiar since I have studied Software Engineering before. However, 462 also includes some new things, like attending the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference. The list of speakers is impressive and the conference promises to be interesting. As for the assigned reading, section 2.5 about moving from being a user of open source software to a contributor encapsulates what I expect this course to be about.