Open Source exploration.

Open source is a topic I've been aware of for quite some time, but I never really took a look at it closely. When I first heard about the OSD600 course, I thought it would be interesting to work on something someone else has developed and help expand upon it. I was first introduced to this in my JAC444 course with Peter Lui. We did a small project on an open source Java project called Robocode. I enjoyed working on Robocode, however, I found that searching through the source code to find what I wanted to be quite a pain. I'm sure reading another program's source code to find out where to begin or what you want to get from it to be the hardest part of writing for an open source project. Once I accomplished this, I did find the project enjoyable.

I have to commend Richard Stallman for founding the free software movement. Providing free software, getting people to build upon it, and evolving a community out of it can definitely create a strong bond between people. If his feelings are genuine I'd have to say that what he really wants is a society that interacts in this manner, not just from a software development perspective. While it would be nice if all software created could be maintained, updated, and distributed for free by the very users that use the software, this does not make sense from a corporate perspective. Unfortunately, a large portion of people believe that living in society is all about the size of your wallet. If you're looking to live in luxury, this is definitely true.

One thing I didn't realize was that there was a difference between "free software" and "open source". I always associated distributing a software application's source code as being the equivalent of making it free. After receiving a detailed explanation of the open source movement, I must say that it does make sense. Allow the users, or co-developers as it was put, help maintain and update the software they like to use. With a much larger "development" and tester base, it's easier to find and squash bugs, effectively making bugs that would appear to be huge problems into shallow nothings. While this does defy the very foundation upon which software engineering is built upon, I never believed there was a definite method for anything. There's always bound to be something that proves an absolute dictated by someone else to be false.

Also, I found the history behind Mozilla to be quite interesting. I wasn't aware that Mozilla originated from Netscape releasing their source code to their browser. I must say, that's quite the bold business move on their behalf.

Considering the amount of material that was thrown at me through these readings and documentaries, I could probably sit here and write about my thoughts all day. Instead I think I'll end things now and possibly expand upon my thoughts in future blogs. What I have written about here were the main points that caught my attention.

Will definitely be writing more later...