Aspects to consider about Open Source Projects

Research and Data

Vicky provided much information on the reproducibility of researches today in class, and I can see how open sourced projects play a big role in the topic. It first is very helpful in terms of preserving the data used in the research. Second, if the documentation is well-written, it is a lot easier for other to redo the research process. Vicky mentions that almost all research, when performed by someone else, will lead to different results. For example, only 30% of psychology research are going to yield the exact results.

OS platform and functions

Having an open sourced platform to store the data and methods of research is also very important. Vicky mentions that GitLab and CI are hosting platforms to check the open code for researches. The importance of using the correct license is also stressed in Vicky’s speech, she even provided an open-sourced website to find the most appropriate license for a project. I think I would be using that in the future.

Reproducibility

Last but not least, Vicky mentions that she starts contributing via helping with documentations, which is a very direct and get-involved-easily way to contribute to a project. Though it does not require writing any code, writing documentations still provides a crucial function for the open-source projects, but in terms of its functionality and reproducibility in the future. I think this is a good suggestion to keep in mind when I find some open source project that interests me.

Potential Projects

I am assigned to look at LibreOffice, and I was quite lucky because if not because of this assignment, I would not read so closely such a huge project, with ts repository and codes, the contributing body, and the structure. The volume of message, the updates, issues, pull requests and how fast they are solved are very impressive. The base of the code is written in mainly Java and XML. I think for programmers interested in office tools, this is going to be a great project to work on

Still searching

While LibreOffice is an impressive project, I still want to find some project that interests me personally. I am looking at a decentralized social network called Friendica, and the concept intrigues me. Friendica has many servers across the world, serving different social groups in a decentralized way. I am still in the middle of understanding how their code is organizing the servers and building a network between them, and I estimate that it will take some time before I am able to fully comprehend the structure. Meanwhile, I am still trying to look for some good finance related open source project If you are reading this blog post and knows some project that you would recommend, please let me know by email : )