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Developing Student skillsthrough Open Source

Arjuna Rao Chavala

arjunaraoc@googlemail.comText: Copyright: CC-ASA-2.0Images: Wikipedia commons

29 Sep 2009

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Agenda

What is Open Source History of Open Source Open source licenses Student 's dreams about Work life and Reality Skills required for work life Open source tasks and benefits How can Students participate? My own experience

QuestionsAcknowledgments: Wiki Commons for the images andwikipedia for definition quotes.

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Open Source

Open source software is an approach to the design,development, and distribution of software, offeringpractical accessibility to a software's source codeo Examples: Linux kernel , GCC, Apache etc

Open source hardware is an approach to the design,development, and distribution of hardware , offeringpractical accessibility to hardware's documentso Example: Original IBM PC , Simputer

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History of Open source

Xerox printer software case 1980 Stallman wanted to add a feature of intimating the job completion or

machine jam status to users that he developed for a printer. He was refused access to the source code for the software of the first laser

printer, the Xerox9700.

This one experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be free tomodify the software they use

Richard Stallman and 4 software freedoms (1985) run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0) study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1) redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2)

improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so thatthe whole community benefits (freedom 3)

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Open source Licenses

GPL : GNU General Public Licenseo Grants the recipients of a computer program the rights

of the free software definition and uses copyleft toensure the freedoms are preserved, even when the workis changed or added to.

o This is in distinction to permissive free softwarelicenses, ex: BSD licenses

LGPL: Lesser GNU General Public Licenseo

Modified, more permissive, version of the GPL, originallyintended for some software libraries.

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Student's dreams about Work Life and Reality

Student's Dreams Develop great innovative products Work with latest technologies Earn good money Enjoy Life

Reality Majority of projects are maintainance Cobol, Fortan, Ada and Pascal are still in use

Good money:-) Tough deadlines and long working hours

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Skills required for work life

Technical skillso Learn new/old technologies

Process skillso Configuration Management

o Change managemento Life cycle management

Domain skillso Learn terminology and foundations of different domains

Soft skillso Communication skillso Leadership skillso Collaboration skills

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Open source projects tasks andbenefits

Tasks Use File Bugs Develop Bug Fixes Develop documentation Participate in events

Benefits Understand Configuration Management

Understand Build and Release process Communicate effectively with other collaborators

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How can Students participate? Select a project

o Open source software projects http://www.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectList http://sourceforge.net/ http://code.google.com/

o Open source hardware projects http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Hardware/Open_Source/

Contribute a bug, bug fix, documentation, translation Attend Unconferences like Barcamp to learn about technology, business

strategy etc Participate in contests

o http://beagleboard.org/o http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/students/scholarshipsawardscon

tests/ieeextreme.html

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How can Faculty help?

Identify Open source areas of excellence for the StudentBrancho Linux kernelo Applicationso Graphicso Language computingo Wikipedia projects

Mentor students to contribute to Projects

Enable code fests/hacks/Unconferences Spread the message of Open source.

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My own experience with Open source

Contributor to Pango (International text processing engine) Interested in indic computing as a hobby. Used to try out each Linux release from 2005 Noticed several issues with Indic support Filed bugs Worked on few bug fixes.

Contributor to Firefox Telugu Reviewed Telugu Translation

Updated and Maintained from 3.0.2

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Questions??