How open source communities and development work

Resources

Slides

• Lecture slides [main resource]
• Introduction to Open Source for Geospatial Analysis and Modeling

Videos

• How Open Source Geospatial Development Works (find the talk in the list, slides) [main resource]
• World Without Linux Final Episode #6 Free Burger

Texts

• What is open source? (opensource.com)
• If you were on a desert island, which license would you take with you? (opensource.com)

Websites

• opensource.com (articles, use cases, and FAQs)

Assignment

Choose an open source project you are using or considering to use. Search on the Internet or in the installation of the software (GUI, CLI, documentation) for information related to use of the project, its community, and development. Find what is the project license, whether the license is approved by OSI or FSF, which type of license it is, how to report bugs and request new features in the project, how to ask questions about using the project, how to contact developers, who provides commercial support, how to get latest source code, where to view the code online, where to get information about contributing to the project, whether the project is active, and anything else what you think is important.

Please, don't do this for GRASS GIS since it is in the lecture presentation. If you were in the class, don't do it for QGIS either since we did in the class. Don't worry about somebody else picking the same project as long as you work on your answer without consulting their work.

To practice Git, create a repository on GitHub (or other service) and put the answers there in a text file formated using Markdown (or other lightweight markup). You can use Git and text editor on your computer, GitHub web interface, or any other tool to work on the text file and work with Git. Sent the link to it to message board.