Social good, business, and open source… These three might seem contradicting and disconnected at first sight, but they do connect through open source. Let’s focus on the open source and social good pair and later the business and open source pair.

A screenshot of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals from the UN website

Before taking this course, I heard about humanitarian projects that aim to do social good through utilizing technology to achieve some of the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals. UN even has an alliance called Digital Impact Alliance (dial) to facilitate the use of technology to achieve their Sustainable Development Goals. These being said, I never thought about these organizations & open source in the same context, and this course helped me to do it. I realized that it makes a lot of sense to combine these two since both of their values align with each other. I learned that this concept is called Humanitarian Free Open Source Software (HFOSS). It was interesting to learn about these values and some of these organizations. We also learned the nuances between the humanitarian open source projects and open source projects for social good.

We even had the time to evaluate some of these projects to understand the project dynamics. I was in the group that analyzed Open Energy Dashboard. After spending a few minutes on the project with my group, we quickly realized that this project requires having access to the power meters, even for setting up the development environment. We also observed that the project was not very active, probably the need to have access to specialized hardware. It was interesting to learn the details of this open source project because the other projects that we analyzed previously were all only software-based. We didn’t need to have specific hardware, or there were simulations to fix this problem. So, analyzing this project helped me to understand the nature of open source projects that revolve around hardware.

A sample dashboard created with Open Energy Dashboard (Source: Open Energy Dashboard website)

Let’s focus on the second pair I have mentioned previously: open source and business. I thought I knew a lot about open source before taking this course, and I realized that some of the things I knew weren’t really correct. The “free” aspect of the open source is one of them. I was thinking about “free” as in free of charge, not as in freedom. Consequently, thinking business and open source together didn’t seem right. How can someone make money out of something that is available free of charge? Are people stupid enough to pay to get something that is already free? Even though this seems like a valid argument, it is not valid at so many levels. We already pay for a lot of things that are free in nature. For example, we pay for access to water! Isn’t water free? 3/4 of the world is covered with oceans, and there are a countless number of lakes and rivers that supply fresh drinking water. So, why are we paying for accessing water? We are actually paying for the services for access to water. For example, we pay for companies to bottle the freshwater and transport it to us. We also pay municipalities to transport the water to our houses and take care of the pipes that transport the water.

Similarly, people make money out of services around open source projects. I learned that the first company that successfully made money around open source software was RedHat, and they made it possible by offering the type of technical support that the open source community does not offer. I also learned about other business models, such as software consulting, subscription offerings, donations, etc. I heard some of these business models before, but it was interesting to see them together while considering business and open source together. Now, I can relate business & open source, and I definitely think that a business can make money while adopting the open source model.

Group project progress

This week we had a lot of progress, and I started enjoying working more with my group. We finished working on the “save dialog” issue (#8094) and @quangIO made the pull request for these changes. The maintainers commented on the pull request, and it is still under review. It is very exciting! We opened another issue (#8257) for adding visual clues for distinguishing hidden files and folders in the file browser window. I proposed reducing the transparency of the hidden files, as shown below:

Left: JupyterLab’s current behavior
Right: our suggestion

However, one of the maintainers told us that this might cause accessibility issues since the contrast ratio between the hidden files and the background doesn’t meet the requirements. So, I proposed a new design like the one below to use transparency with different icons. We are still waiting for feedback from the community.

Left: JupyterLab’s current behavior
Right: our updated suggestion

Finally, we created another issue (#8259) to address the issues with the developer manual. There are a few vague and difficult to understand the steps in the manual, and this issue aims to make it easier to understand for beginners. The community acknowledged the issues, and we are working on the pull request to make these changes.