Open source: dangerous to computing education? (opensource.com) [LWN.net]

Open source: dangerous to computing education? (opensource.com)

Posted Feb 17, 2010 10:19 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151)
In reply to: Open source: dangerous to computing education? (opensource.com) by rodgerd
Parent article: Open source: dangerous to computing education? (opensource.com)

If the evidence says that. But it doesn't. All it does say is that there
are less developers of open source projects than there are in proprietary
development and that they are less diverse.

It does not say a single word about the reasons for this! You just assume
that the reason must be that it's easier to get involved with proprietary
software development, completely regarding more probable reasons like:

* for two decades, the proprietary model was the only one known to the
general public. That's huge momentum that has to be overcome first.
* you usually make money developing proprietary software! That's an
immediate benefit that people really like.

Things could clearly be better in many open source projects, but the truth
is certainly a little bit more complex, than you seem to think.

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Open source: dangerous to computing education? (opensource.com)

Posted Feb 17, 2010 10:34 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

All the places I have worked in enjoy very low entry barriers into projects. That leads directly to crap code. The cause is, of course, that commercial software development is intensely focused on time to market and keeping development costs low.
Quality code needs knowledge of the problem and the tools. With that in mind, some entry barrier is a good thing, provided it's not unnecessarily high.

Open source: dangerous to computing education? (opensource.com)

Posted Feb 17, 2010 17:53 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

I think one of the points is that instead of a barrier, there should be a ramp -- the goal is to produce high quality code, but also to produce people who can produce the next round of high quality code. That doesn't mean you have to ship their first patch as submitted...

Open source: dangerous to computing education? (opensource.com)

Posted Feb 17, 2010 17:52 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

Uh, but surely there *is* lots of evidence that it is difficult to get involved in FOSS? AFAICT every educator who's tried has had multiple students get bounced off by flames, etc. I know for sure that this has been a problem for Summer of Code students, and they have all this institutional support behind them, never mind the random student just sending in a patch for fun. (Yes, yes, this is anecdotal, whatever. I haven't seen any controlled study giving evidence the other way, either, so we have to use what we have.)

And you're ignoring the diversity issue -- your "more probable reasons" all apply equally to everyone, so they don't explain why, e.g., men end up participating so much more. And in fact we don't have to speculate, since it's well documented that women face some serious obstacles to participation.

No-one's saying the truth is simple, but I think it's more productive to take a look at the obstacles that exist and think about whether they really reflect our values and goals.

Open source: dangerous to computing education? (opensource.com)

Posted Feb 17, 2010 20:55 UTC (Wed) by xaoc (guest, #54140) [Link]

"we have to use what we have."

If we don't have much we better make some.

Now I know this may well be an exception but still:
A few weeks ago i sent a small patch to kde about kate/kwrite. The people were very nice and the first one to welcome me on the was female. The developer responsible for the specific file gave a tip on how to make the patch better later he included it in the package.

Let's not generalize quickly based on a few examples of flames or not here and there.