This was an amazing guest talk, I actually learned so much about open source, and reproducibility and the potential that open source projects have to further an important goal of researchers and data librarians I had never really thought of before. This talk kind of revealed to me the impact that open source contributers can have beyond programming. The fact that there are people working on ensuring the survival of writing, research, code, data and much more is quite inspiring given how little attention most institutions seem to pay to maintaining older codebases and anything that isn’t currently in use. Furthermore, it was good to get a contrast between the previous speaker who works primarily for a private company, versus Vicky who works for NYU and seems to have more free reign over vocalizing opinions about open source vs closed source. It was honestly very cool and I learned a lot.

Vicky also spoke at length about the various platforms for Git and the inadequacies of the current standard of using Github. It was sad but good to learn that having all my code on Github is a bad idea because they reserve the rights to remove my and any other programmers access to our own code at any time. It was somewhat shocking, and definitely gave me another reason to switch to another Git platform provider. She also explained why it’s important to license all of our code regardless of platform, so that it is possible for people to utilize it. It made me think a lot, and when I have time I will license my code.

Overall, I learned a lot about both the concept of reproducibility and also open source in general while also learning about reasons for supporting the push for open source beyond just programming.