Learning Free Software Development from Real­World Experience

Juan J. Marín Martínez

International Conference on IntelligentNetworking and Collaborative

Systems (INCoS 2009) Phd. Forum

Barcelona, SpainNovember 6th, 2009

- It's an on-line University- 90% of the students are between 25 and 40 years old, employed and with little time to study

- Train qualified personnel at this field- The European Union has recommended these kind of studies- From a multidisciplinary point of view (legal, social and technological)

Master on Free Software

- The Official Master Programme on Free Software consists of 60 European credits of which 15 credits correspond to a final course- The first part of this final course is theorical where the some collaborative for development are presented and finally it is studied how to achieve a community around a software project.- The second one, and the most important, the students are encouraged to set up a free software project with the aim of making its development community-driven.

Versus

- Student projects written from the scratch and discarded- Setting up a community is a quite complex task: o The programming effort consumes most of the time o Skills to recruit, motivate, and manage the community o Sourceforge.net stats: the 68% of the projects has only one contributor and the 15% only two.

- Join a stablished project: GNOME- Collaborate on the subproject Evince, a document viewer for multiple document formats

- Elaborate a roadmap of activities.

- Difficult to calculate the time requirements: o Exposition to a large code base. o Your work is under revision of other people.

- Start with activities with a "scratching your personal itch" motivation.

INITIAL PROBLEMS

INTERACTING WITH THE COMMUNITY

- GNOME has a strong community which is ready to help you.

- The key element on the project is communication.

- We can identify different roles in the community.

PROGRAMMING

- Hard at the early stages because I have to learn the GNOME platform.

- Understand how the code works.

- The importance of the “Coding style” for working on community.

- Simple patches are easier to apply than complex ones.

- Exposition to different technologies or specifications (eg: XMP, Cairo)

- Interactions with other Free Software Projects (eg. share-mime-info).

CONCLUSIONS

The interaction with the GNOME community is a unique first-hand experience to understand the practical underpinnings of free software development.

As Patterson states “it is inspiring for computer science students to work on real production projects”, an opportunity that civil engineering or history students do not have, but that in general is not considered in traditional computer science courses

Thanks for your attention

ANY QUESTIONS ?

Acknowledgment Master Thesis advisor Ph.D. Gregorio Robles-Martínez GNOME hackers

Carlos García-Campos Nickolay V. Shmyrev Christian Persch