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Student participation in open source projects (opensource.com)Student participation in open source projects (opensource.com)Posted Dec 2, 2010 19:52 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)Parent article: Student participation in open source projects (opensource.com) Usually the students go on to their next project at the end of the seminar and that's too fast for them to be useful to the Open Source community. It's only an extended involvement that will be much good.
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Student participation in open source projects (opensource.com) Posted Dec 2, 2010 23:34 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
The nature of undergraduate education is to teach students certain skills, which they will hopefully find helpful in later courses and after they graduate; for society, the goal is to have more people with those skills. The goal of student participation at the undergraduate level in open source shouldn't be to get working code for the project they are participating in, but rather to give them the instinct to participate in the development of the software they use over the rest of their careers, rather than only asking for features or coping with not having them.
Student participation in open source projects (opensource.com) Posted Dec 3, 2010 0:09 UTC (Fri) by ebiederm (subscriber, #35028) [Link]
A seminar is plenty of time for an itch scratching project or two. The kind of thing where a few lines here or there make a big difference in the usability of the software, even it if doesn't make a big difference in the
functionality of the software.
Furthermore a lot of opensource work is done as someone fixes just one thing about a program that causes them trouble, but the submitter does not become a regular contributor. Certainly that much can be done in a the length of a semester.
Eric
Student participation in open source projects (opensource.com) Posted Dec 5, 2010 19:19 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] It is not easy to assemble a few dozen students with itches to scratch, even much less itches that can reasonably be fixed in a single term.
Student participation in open source projects (opensource.com) Posted Dec 9, 2010 19:12 UTC (Thu) by ccurtis (guest, #49713) [Link]
I have my doubts about your assertion.
The way this could work out well is if the professor is the long term contributor, and assigns students appropriate tasks. The class would then essentially compete for the best implementation to be submitted upstream.
But this is broadly the same concept as the Google Summer of Code, with the caveat that instead of the students pursuing something they're specifically interested in, these students are trying to learn a skill. Rarely is the result of learning some wonder to behold (to the contrary, most learning is as a result of failure).
Having more students involved in open source concepts and communities is certainly a good thing for open source as a whole, but unlikely to be a panacea without significant cultivation on behalf of this professor.
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