This week in Open Source we continued working on our Group Project Contributions in addition to wrapping up our discussion regarding Humanitarian Free and Open Source Projects. We also had the opportunity to learn more about Open Source Business Models and discuss some of the previous guest speakers we had and share our thoughts on Open Source in a Corporate context.

Group Project Update

My team and I spent the past week refining our wireframes for both the Web and Mobile version of the pages we are building. We also set up the development environment and have started coding out the first page we plan to contribute to Oppia.

We were able to set up the environment by reading through the documentation. Our oppia contact, Sean Lip also gave us an overview of the code repository. We all have experience creating HTML websites, but the Oppia code is much more sophisticated than what we are used to. Adding a new page to the site involves more than just creating an HTML page. We had to add the page to several locations and we also had to set up a virtual environment to preview our changes.

One challenge that we have to overcome is being able to incorporate translations on the page. Since people across the globe use Oppia, our page has to enable users to change the language. There is documentation on how to enable this, and we hope to figure this piece out soon.

HFOSS

Last week we dedicated a lesson to learning about Open Source Efforts regarding COVID-19. This week we continued our conversation but talked about Humanitarian Free and Open Source Projects regarding causes outside of COVID-19. For example we talked about Tidepool, a tool that helps people who have diabetes and clinicians who have patients with Diabetes. Me and a fellow classmate were really interested in this particular project and decided to evaluate it further.

We were shocked to see how massive their code base was. Within the Tidepool project there are many different repositories that make the project what it is. If you would like to read more about Tidepool here is our evaluation.

Open Source Business Models

On Wednesday we learned more about how certain business models are built around open source. I did not know this before, but RedHat was the first company that made money around open source software through subscriptions. They charge their users for the right to download Red Hat Linux. Beyond subscriptions, other companies make money around open source through software consultations, donations, etc.

After learning more about how companies have built business models around open source, we had a discussion about our general thoughts on this. It can be harmful when we talk about the Open Core model which involves building proprietary software on top of open source software and then charge existing users to use the new version. However it can also be beneficial to the Open Source community for companies to get involved. For example I recall when we had Kevin Fleming from Bloomberg speak to us. He talked about how Bloomberg had a team dedicated to improving Jupyter. They knew their customers used the software and wanted to give them the best experience possible. Bloomberg had the resources to see how to improve Jupyter and they were able to improve the Open Source Software.