The third book of the semester, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, examines the history, motivations, sociology, philosophy, and economics behind the open source movement. In his writings, ESR spends a significant amount of time discussing different projects such as Linux, Mozilla, and Fetchmail.
The goal of the third project is for you to explore an existing open source project and provide a case study of it. The artifact that you will create is a presentation that you will need to present to the class.
Working in groups of 2 - 4, students must create a case study that meets the following requirements:
The project your group studies must be a well established open source project with a reasonable amount of history such as:
A. Mozilla
B. GCC
C. Linux
D. Golang
E. Python
F. Ubuntu
G. LibreOffice
H. Wordpress
I. Vim
Ideally, it would be a project that you use regularly and have an interest in.
The presentation must include the following topics:
A. A brief summary of what the project is, what its goals are, who is the target audience, and what are its key features (ie. why is it interesting).
B. A discussion on the motivation, history, and future of the project (including any interesting forks, derivatives, or spin-offs).
C. A discussion on the technology involved in the project (ie. software stack).
D. A discussion on whether or not the project follows any of ESR's 19 principles that he enumerated in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
E. A discussion of what sort of homesteading in the noosphere the project participates in (ie. how does the community communicate and organize itself, what sort of web properties does it run, etc.).
F. A discussion on the license the project uses and who contributes to the project's magic cauldron.
Here are some interesting resources:
On Tuesday, April 11, the class period will be used as a hackathon where groups can work on finishing up their project.
To help fuel the creative enterprise, chinese food and coke will be served, provided the necessary funding can be allocated.
If you are interesed in helping pool resources, please let the instructor know.
On Thursday, April 13, students will present their case studies. Each group will have between 5 and 8 minutes to present.
Once you have organized your group and have code repository, please fill out the following form to let us know where to find it: