Summary of Week 13
This week I made two contributions to freeCodeCamp. After looking through the GitHub issues for one involving curriculum, I found one regarding JavaScript prototypes. The issue suggested that the JS challenge about prototypes left out some detail that made the explanation unclear. I created a pull request on 11/21 that added a link within the challenge to an article that discusses prototypes in detail. It had been a while since the issue was proposed, and I did not immediately hear back after creating the PR. After a couple of days, I reached out to a maintainer that was part of the issue discussion and although I did not get back from them, I heard back from a different maintainer. The maintainer thought that links within challenges should be avoided and ultimately removed. He suggested that the sentence in the challenge explaining prototypes should be edited and he requested changes. I edited the PR and it was approved and merged on 11/25.

Additionally, this week I was looking through the CONTRIBUTING.md document and saw a capilization error. The project stated that if you see a spelling or grammar mistake, it is not necessary to create an issue but just to create a PR. I created a PR on 11/29 to fix this error, and on 11/30 the PR was merged.

My Thoughts on An Open Source Humanitarian Project
On the Opensource.com Humanitarian page, I saw the article titled Half of the world’s languages are dying. Should we save them? As someone that comes from a billingual family, this title immediately stuck out to me. In my family, as generations pass, it becomes less of an expectation for the kids to learn how to speak Spanish and so this issue is very prominant in my life. I was curious how technology would come into play in preserving languages. One of the language preservation initiatives that stuck out to me was StoryCorps because their mission is to preserve languages through storytelling. I thought this was very interesting because it uses volunteers to tell stories, so the stories are authentic and genuine. After reading how many different open source approaches there are to trying to preserve a language, I began to see just how difficult it was to do so. With preserving a language comes having to be able to identify them, create documentation for that language, have methods for using it in technology such as having the characters available to be able to type, and the list goes on. Something I thought was interesting, that author pointed out, was that some minority languages die out because they are spoken by the indigenous natives or those living in poverty. I then started to think about whether the language preservation initiatives even attempt to preserve these languages and how this would happen, because this would require a lot of ground work.

My Thoughts on Tom Callaway’s Musings on business models for open source software
Callaway mentions that in proprietary software oftentimes the vendors reach a point where they do not need to keep providing a better product because they already have their customers’ money. He also states that “Even if a customer was never going to make a change to the source code, or even look at it, the knowledge that they could (or that they could hire anyone else to maintain it for them) was empowering.” I think that this really sums up one of the major ideas that keeps getting brought up in many of the articles that we have read in the class. This idea being that along with open source comes control or at least the thought of being in control if you are not sure of what to do with it.
I found it interesting that Callaway stated that he predicts that open source will “replace the proprietary bits in the open core model”. I think that with open source comes education and knowing that there are other options other than proprietary offerings. Thus, I think that in order for open source to replace proprietary in the open core model, customers need to be aware of open source and be educated.

My Reactions to 8 advantages of using open source in the enterprise
Being that this article is supposed to convince a CIO’s to use open source in their enterprise, I think that the most important points are the cost-effectiveness and speed. As a company you do not want to pay a lot of money and you want to be ahead of every one else, thus I think these reasons might be a little more important for trying to convince a CIO to move to open source. Although, it is stated that “open source is the future”, I think that companies will wait until the last possible minute to move to open source because they would want to see how it works for other companies and then will follow suit.

I would not mind working for a company that only produced open source because I now see that it is not impossible to make money off of open source, so this would not be an issue. I personally feel that there are more benefits to being open source than propriety, given the reasons that we have been learning all semester. I enjoyed that I was able to give my input to a project and not have to wait for a new release of the project in order to see the change, or to see someone else interpret the changes that I wanted to make. Thus, I would like to see software production to be more inclusive in the future for reason.