Project Evaluations

Godot was the open source project some classmates and I evaluated this past week. It wasn’t a particularly challenging task, however I did learn a bit about what aspects (hint: not necessarily code) of a project are important for an open source project to flourish and gain contributors.

• Ease of organization helps—a lot. When I say ease of organization, I mean how easy is it for people to locate information about the project related to contributing, the community, and the like. For Godot, their website was richly detailed with many resources for presumptive contributors and users, and their GitHub repository included a concise, descriptive README that included links to all those documents pertaining to the “open-ness” of their project. Everything was easy to follow and got us up to speed really quickly.
• Source code documentation should be thorough. While Godot’s miscellaneous information regarding the project was spot on, their source code documentation was nearly non-existent. They had a docs page, but it seemed to be primarily focused on helping users use and experiment with the capabilities of the engine rather than for developers. Not having well-commented source code can make it tough for those who want to contribute to the source code itself because it won’t be readily apparent to them what a piece of code may do.

Open Source Talk With Kevin P. Fleming (Bloomberg LP)

It’s quite surprising to me the extent in which a big company such as Bloomberg takes part in open source software. The slide in which Mr. Fleming showed all of the open source projects the team at Bloomberg used from DevOps tools to coding software showed a staggering amount of projects, which makes sense as a lot of them are industry standard tools at this point. However, it’s Bloomberg’s own contributions to various projects that piqued my interest the most:

• Integrating a private data field into TypeScript. I found it quite awesome that the team at Bloomberg took the intitiative in trying to make the private tag more ubiquitous in TypeScript in order to allow safer code. It’s an immensely practical action that shows how open source technologies allows companies to both configure their own solutions in the tools they use while also giving back to the community.
• Investing in Apache Solr. If I remember correctly, Mr. Fleming more or less said that Solr is a huge part of the Bloomberg platform, and that Bloomberg is basically one of the hugest contributors (maybe even one of the founders(?) citation needed) to the project.

Making use of open source technologies in its own products, Bloomberg can have a huge effect on the way these tools progress while simultaneously reaping the rewards of their continued contributions. The relationship between Bloomberg and open source is a great example of how companies embracing open source can lead to agreeble outcomes for everyone.