Open Source in Education Why students and teachers should care David Nalley September 19, 2008

Not my idea 2 Dave Patterson, Professor at UC Berkeley, and past president of the ACM, said in an open letter to the community as he was leaving his term at the ACM that a course in open source development was the number one "course I would love to take" as part of the computer science education in the 21st Century David A. Patternson, "Computer Science Education in the 21st Century," Communications of the ACM, Vol 49, Number 1, March 2006.

What OSS is not ● Hippies ● Anti-capitalistic 3

What is Open Source Software ● Software that is generally free of cost, but not always ● More importantly software that is free in the following ways: – The freedom to run the program, for any purpose – The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs – The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor – The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits 4

Who contributes ● Corporations – Red Hat – IBM – Intel ● Individuals – Teenagers in high school – People with no “IT background” ● Governments – NSA – DHS 5

Some Examples of Open Source Software ● Apache httpd ● OpenOffice.org ● Linux ● Firefox

What is Fedora? A Linux Distribution ● Free, Innovative, Robust, Free ● Has its origins with Red Hat Linux ● Differs from Red Hat Enterprise Linux – Frequent releases (every 6 months) – Leading edge ● Fedora is the upstream for other distributions – RHEL – OLPC 7

Why should educators use contributing to open source in the classroom? 8 ● The Challenges currently experienced – Traditional Internships often come with NDAs or other restrictions – Collaboration – 4 students working together isn't the same as the collaboration in the real world. ● Same rough developmental level ● Same culture and geographic origin – Scale – Working with a project that's greater than 10k lines – Waste - The hard work is often scrapped at the end of the year

Why should educators use contributing to open source in the classroom? 9 ● The challenges educators face with using OSS – Success often hinges on an instructor's level of involvement with the OSS community. – OSS community and project workflow often something educators are unfamiliar with and thus are uncomfortable teaching. – Project choice can be challenging ● Too small or too inactive of a project may not yield benefits. ● Some projects have high barriers to entry. – These are real projects-- parameters may not match up with work produced, even if the work is good.

Why should educators use contributing to open source in the classroom? 10 ● Benefits for educators and students – Everything is open and visible – Collaborating with others on a global scale ● Geographically different ● Culturally disparate ● Varying skill levels – Very large scale projects – Dealing with code written by someone else

Why should educators use contributing to open source in the classroom? 11 ● Dealing with non-developmental activities – holistic approach – Architect – Developer – QA Engineer – Project Manager – Release Engineer – Community Organizer – Support Analyst – Documentation Writer/Editor

Why should students want to be involved in open source? ● Is the above not enough? ● Fame ● One commit = affiliation with a recognizable and global project for your CV – Employers can see your interaction with the project – Employers can look at code you've written ● Friends – networking ● Experience

Are there benefits to educational institutions that we can sell Administration? ● Short term – colleges and universities want their students to get good jobs. ● Long term – colleges and universities want their students to be models that reflect well on the school ● Reputation is important (aka Fame) – With open source everything is open for people to see the contributions. ● What's the benefit to a school's reputation if their students write software for OLPC ● What esteem is garnered when a school writes extensions for Mozilla Firefox?

Successes ● Students – Russell Bryant ● Colleges – CMU – Berkeley – Seneca College – Oregon State University – Trinity College

Resources ● For Educators – ● For Students – Start with – irc.freenode.net - #fedora-students