In class:

On Thursday in class Karen Sandler came to speak to us about licensing. She answered many of our questions, stressed the importance of open source code, but also raised a lot of issues in my mind, such as what might incentivize companies to make their code open source. On Monday in class, we spoke about IRC and set up a class chatroom.

On my own:

I read Section 5 found here on how to submit a contribution. A lot of work goes into submitting a contribution, and much of it is detailed there. There’s a section on communicating, which I guess is important in any sort of relationship, including one between contributors and maintainers/owners. It seems a lot of research must be done before a contribution can really be made. One has to watch a project for a while, and understand who the actors are before even beginning a conversation. Only then an issue can be opened, and making sure that an issue is relevant is nontrivial in and of itself.

The second reading assigned can be found (here)[http://www.compsci.hunter.cuny.edu/~sweiss/course_materials/csci395.86/activities_f19/project_evaluation_activity.pdf]. It’s rather long, but it’s very informative. It provides many questions one should ask themselves before contributing to a project. One that particularly struck a chord with me was “What is the development environment, and how hard is it to download and install it?”. In the past, when attempting to contribute to projects, I definitely struggled with the development environment. But now, when I look for a project to contribute to, I will definitely take a look at that before getting too excited.

I took a quick look at the (Noson project)[https://github.com/janbar/noson-app/]. It seems to have no contributing file, but the readme contains build instructions, so that’s a good start.