A buzz word that has been floating around for years, I was very intrigued by the opportunity to take a class on this topic and I wanted to get some hands on experience. I have looked at open source projects but often found it to be intimidating to dive straight in as a contributor and so I thought, what better way to do this than in a supportive setting such as a classroom.

The initiative for open source projects from my perspective is largely a positive one and reaps many benefits for its key players. There is a low or negligible initial cost for both the developers looking to help contribute to projects and the non-developer users who may need to fix bugs or desire new features. Because of this low barrier to entry for developers, there is often a highly reliable community that can respond quickly to bugs and produce results; creating high turnaround for updates. This also means that open source projects often tend to evolve quickly and can adapt to changing conditions, providing a project the advantage of longevity. There’s flexibility, even research to support that open source projects tend to be more secure, and many more advantages.

Of course, nothing is ever a perfect system and there are disadvantages as well as challenges. Just as open source is an invitation to a diverse set of contributors with noble intentions and abilities, it is also and invitation for those with the opposite. A developer with hostile intentions can tamper with the project and create more problems for the community; open source projects also tend not to be very user-friendly for non-developers looking to play around with and propose their own ideas. Additionally, the reliance on a voluntary community invites the possbility of the discontinuation of a project if there is a large lack of interest in developers.

I’m interested to learn through experience some of the best ways to approach an open source project in a responsible and respectful way. Some of the projects that have inspired me and that I have used include React, seaborn, Visual Studio Code, and MongoDB. These are just a few of the tools and platforms that have helped me in seeing the reliability and potential of an open source proejct. I look forward to being part of a community and learning more about open source best practices in this course!