OpenFoodFacts Contributions

In the last week, my group and I made significant progress in our contributions to OpenFoodFacts. We finished up on a new dark mode feature. During a group meeting, we divided up the roles and responsibilities for each member. I was responsible of working on the CSS file that changes the website’s style and layout. I am very new to CSS and HTML, making working on this project challenging at first. The biggest challenge was not writing code that works but reading and understanding already existing code that is a part of the project. We all had trouble finding the HTML files that created the website. After searching all files unable to identify the files we needed, I decieded to reach out to one of the administrators of the project. I found that the main files that builds the website was not a HTML file but a Perl file. I don’t know any Perl, and it was very challenging to understand what the code was doing. The file lack proper documentation/comments. After reading and syphering the code for hours, I was able to make the CSS files. Our goal to finish this feature was April 27, and we meet the goal. We opened a pull request to have our changes merge.

For my individual contributions, I have been working on making small changes. I found an open issue that deals with making the website more accessible. I commented on the issue about potentially working but received no responses. I realized that this issue had already been worked on but was never closed. I also started translating the website. My second language is Bangla. On the OpenFoodFacts wiki, they mentioned they needed help translating the website into various language, including Bangla. I plan on doing a file a week.

So far, I think my group and I made good progress on out group contributions and individual contributions.

Types of Open Source Projects

On Monday’s lecture, we continued our discussion on Humanitarian Free Open Source Software (HFOSS). In smaller groups we did another round of project evaluations. My group did a project evaluation for a project called Hospital Run. Hospital Run is a free, and easy to use software for developing world healthcare. It is a popular offline electronic health records and hospital information system. I thought this project was really interesting. It is much smaller than the other projects I’ve looked at in the last few months. The project has less contributors, and only has about 10 pull requests in the last three months. Although the project is not as active, it is still very popular and useful. I thought this lecture of HFOSS was really interesting and introduced me to the different types of Open Source project that are out there.

Open Source Business Models

On Wednesday’s lecture, we discussed business models centered around Free and Open Source Source projects. Before entering this class, I had a very limited view of what open source is. I thought that open source projects were mainly side projects that engineers, and developers worked on outside of their main job. Also, I assumed that there is not much monetary profit involved in open source project. However, as we saw with the guest lecturers and Wednesday’s lecture, it is a clever way for a big business to make profit. During lecture, Professor Joanna made it clear that “Open Source is Not a Business Model but, there are business models that are built around open source projects.” Open source projects can bring in money for companies. This made me think of the guest speaker we had from Verizon Media, Gil Yehuda. He spoke about ways that open source makes money for Verizon. Also, there are different models in which companies use open source. One of which is Open Core. Open Core provide the core of the project as open source, while keeping addons, customizations, and improvements as proprietary. An example of this is GitLab. Overall, I thought this lecture was really interesting as it showed a different side to open source.