These week, the two classes we had focused on Humanitarian Free and Open Source (HFOSS) projects, which are projects that apply the ideals of open source towards helping humanitarian needs, and open source business models, which are ways people make money off of open source projects.

HFOSS projects

Hearing about these efforts to help better the world is definitely great, especially during times of crisis like we are in now. All HFOSS projects are useful and we should be grateful that people are taking time out of their busy days to help others, but in particular I was interested in Free Code Camp and Oppia. I was interested in these two projects because of their mission to provide free education to anyone that is curious and motivated enough to learn outside of school. Although the coronavirus definitely made many lives much more difficult, it has also provided some people (me included) some more free time. I think that this free time is a great opportunity for people to begin learning something that they always have been meaning to learn. Projects like Free Code Camp and Oppia lower the barrier to entry to learn certain things and limits the excuses for people not to learn more.

I had some experience with Free Code Camp in the past so I decided to poke around Oppia a little bit more. While Free Code Camp is focused on web development, Oppia seems to be more focused on topics that middle schoolers or high schoolers would be exploring. It definitely has more of a fun vibe to it which is more kid-friendly. Resources like these are great for encouraging young kids to want to learn.

Learning about these kinds of projects reminded me of those Github repositories that don’t contain any sort of code, but are just a README that contains a lot of information on a particular subject. For example, this repository is just a list of resources that anybody who wants to learn more about machine learning can use. I don’t believe it is classified as a HFOSS project, but it’s nice that people use Github as a way to hae a cumulative list of great resources that they used and found useful.

Open Source Business Models

Previously we had guest speakers who came in to talk about how they use open source in their large corporation. This class was more focused on how a company/person makes money directly from open source.

I was particularly interested in three of the business models: software consulting, open core, and open source bounty

Software Consulting

A company is involved in software consulting when they provide services of recommending software to their clients so that their clients don’t have to do all of the research. This is an open source business model because companies that participate in software consulting are getting paid and some of the softwares they could recommend could be open source. Prior to this class, I have never heard of software consulting before and I found it interesting because I never really thought of it existing before. There seems to be so many aspects of consulting and software consulting seems like a possible interect with technology and business.

Open Core

A company is open core when their core feature are free for anyone to use, but if the users can opt to pay money for more add-on features on top of the free, core features. An example of an open core company is Gitlab. I enjoyed hearing about this business model because it reminded me about the business models of some video games nowadays. These videogames usually come out for free so that everyone can play and use it, and once the player gets more invested into the game, they can choose to spend more money on things that would enhance their experience like cosmetic items. I really enjoy this concept in videogames since it allows the game to reach a wider audience and I think it has the same effect for open core companies.

Open Source Bounty

Open source bounty is the concept where companies would offer a bounty for others to contribute to an open source project in a particular way, like fixing a bug or adding a feature. An example of this is Mozilla would pay people money if they discover/fix a bug in their open source software. I found this interesting because I have never thought of a potential side job being contributing to an open source project because a company is heavily reliant on it. It seems too good to be true and heavily benefits both parties: the individual because they are making money and the company because they are kind of outsourcing work that they cannot do to others who are willing to do it.

Conclusion

Overall, I really enjoyed the past two classes, in particular the open source business models since I never really thought of how people could make money off of something that people usually expect to be free.

Additionally, this past week one of the contributions I made was updating the personal life section of a popular artist on wikipedia. I enjoyed making this contribution because although there isn’t a great demand to know about an artist’s personal life, I’m sure there will be some curious people who find it interesting if they stumble across the page. It wasn’t too hard to make since I knew most of the information already.

And this concludes this weeks post! Thank you for reading and see you next week!