Open source embraces strong values of community, collaboration, and transparency, for the benefit of the platform and its users. This relationship with the community pushes developers to constantly contribute new functions and to ensure old ones perform properly. As a result, popular open source software (OSS) projects are often on the cutting edge of technology. Additionally, budding engineers have a unique opportunity to become a part of meaningful large scale projects.

That being said, in the midst of all the great innovations comes the economics and politics that sometimes is forgotten about by novice open source collaborators. Initially, OSS requires little to no upfront costs which seem ideal for start-up businesses or new engineers interested in working on a challenging project. Despite fleeing from these fees temporarily, if any problems occur that might need immediate attention there is no one vendor to complain to. Instead, start-up businesses who rely heavily on open source software with minimal engineering background will have to outsource. Additionally, licensing open source software has led to a few legal cases that often takes away from the freedoms that come with using open source software.

Upon graduation I will be working as a software engineer at a medical company that uses Ruby and EmberJS, both of which are open source. I hope to learn more about the history of open source while also getting involved in projects greater than myself. Throughout my academic career, I found that independent work was favored over collaborative. This class offers an opportunity to work with my classmates and others to solve issues that are worth more than a letter grade. Without realizing it, I have actively used open source products since early high school. Medium, an online publishing platform, has been my go-to site for quick and interesting reads on almost any topic. Now becoming more aware that it is an open source project, I am both curious and excited about the potential opportunity to contribute to their site. Beyond my casual reading, Eclipse, React and Materialize are all softwares and frameworks I have used throughout my academic career and current job. All these tools have excellent documentation and have helped make the learning process significantly easier for myself and other engineers. Understanding the tremendous impact they have had in my day-to-day programming, I hope to contribute and progress their technology forward.