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Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

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Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#161

Post by em-bee »

atxbcp wrote: post #102
em-bee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities are not vocational education facilities though the problem is that this doesn't matter, because all the industry expects is programming skills, and while any fachhochschule, french engineering school, or even a US community college could provide those programming skills, the university provides them too, and as a result, a university graduate has more job options than a graduate from those other schools.…

The french "engineering schools" are actually considered the elite scientific education in France. They are infinitely more selective than universities and provide much better job options. Equating french engineering school with US community college makes no sense whatsoever, and saying "a university graduate has more job options than a graduate from those other schools" is plain wrong (in France).

well, i am not trying to claim that they are equivalent, but that they could be, or should.

i was not aware that the french engineering schools were at that level.

so in fact that means that france has achieved what everyone else should aspire to.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#162

Post by nicoburns »

uberswe wrote: post #122
jerf wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Universities are not vocational education facilities though." Their prices say they are. There is no way they could be as expensive as they are, except that they are capturing a lot of the value of the vocational education they are expected to provide. Their prices speak louder than high-falutin' principles. I'll permit University's their "we're not vocational training facilities" argument when their prices come bac…

This is more of a US problem. In the EU much of higher education is very cheap or free. Some students even get paid a small amount of money and have access to loans with low interested and great terms so that it's easier to focus on school and everyone is on a more even playing field.

US and UK. We might get a loan in the UK, but the level of debt is still excessive.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#163

Post by dblohm7 »

If instructors are going to ask their students to do this, they need to make sure they are doing so meaningfully.

At Mozilla we can tell when each semester begins because our bug tracker receives an influx of bogus bugs that were obviously filed by students who were asked to do so as part of an assignment.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#164

Post by mkl95 »

ozim wrote: post #145
mkl95 wrote: post #92

In my opinion, the Hacktoberfest controversy last year points at the opposite being true. A computing student is not likely to understand the processes and etiquette of the industry. Open Source projects are not toy projects, billions of $ depend on them running smoothly, and I don't think we should expect someone with no industry experience to have assimilated this fact. Lately I have been observing an endemic probl…

This seems like another argument for "Private copying levy" but for open source developers that create useful libraries. So maintainers would be receiving some kind of stipend and not abandon projects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

I mean, Github Sponsors has been a thing for a while, but it doesn't seem to be too popular.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#165

Post by mywittyname »

I have to say that I'm against this strategy for a number of reasons,

1. It puts the onus on figuring out what to do on the student. And since there's no promise of guidance from the project, the student could spend on their time flailing around and accomplishing nothing.

2. Large OSS projects require specialized knowledge. It can take years to develop the knowledge necessary to make meaningful contributions to a project. There shouldn't be an expectation that students have the requisite knowledge to contribute. So the student is probably going to be relegated to minor bug fixes, documentation, or other kind of mindless tasks that no one else wants to pick up.

3. It takes time away from learning fundamentals. I think most students would benefit from building their own project rather than contributing to OSS. For example, building a working web server will teach a student a LOT more than a few commits to Django ever would.

Contributing to open source is great for certain students. I love the Google's Summer of Code and the like, where students have an idea of what they want to create, and the project is incentivized to provide a mentor to the student because they get funding. But expanding that model to every student is foolish and hurts less privileged students a lot.

A good middle ground would be to have a course use open source code as a foundation for a project, but not require contributions back to the project. I had a computer security course lab that required us to find a specific exploit in an old version of sudo and create a patch for it. The issue was many years old by this point, so giving the patch back to the project was pointless, but we still learned the fundamentals of working on an OSS project; how to document issues, how to create patches, how to create test cases, etc. And since it was a lab, we could ask other students if we got stuck.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#166

Post by bsedlm »

Ensorceled wrote: post #80

How would this work? How many project maintainers would sign on for this? "Hey, can you merge this PR? I'll fail if you don't review and merge this by tomorrow morning. I'm sorry I left it until the last minute but I had a bunch of work do to in another class and couldn't get to it until today." "Hey, I ran everything through flake and black and spent the past 72 hours getting my test coverage (and the coverage of th…

WHat if schools "economically" motivated them?

or maybe the teacher/professor IS on the maintainers list?

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#167

Post by atxbcp »

em-bee wrote: post #161
atxbcp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The french "engineering schools" are actually considered the elite scientific education in France. They are infinitely more selective than universities and provide much better job options. Equating french engineering school with US community college makes no sense whatsoever, and saying "a university graduate has more job options than a graduate from those other schools" is plain wrong (in France).

well, i am not trying to claim that they are equivalent, but that they could be, or should. i was not aware that the french engineering schools were at that level. so in fact that means that france has achieved what everyone else should aspire to.

they are not equivalent, and they couldn't be, shouldn't be, and won't be. Most engineering schools recruit after two years of highly theoretical education in mathematics and physics (classes préparatoires) and the level in mathematics and physics is much higher than the undergraduate level in the university. You're being misled by the term "engineering school" which makes it sound like this is some practical / technical education, when it's in fact the exact opposite.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#168

Post by zsmi »

xf1cf wrote: post #4

What ever happened to exploring computing through just building small, cool, things? Maybe I'm old now, but this trope has been parroted here and elsewhere as a panacea. Need a job? Contribute to open source for the CV experience. Need something to do? Contribute to open source. I could see this as maybe something for a small software engineering course to do. maybe. I think in those cases it might even be better to…

> What ever happened to exploring computing through just building small, cool, things?

It totally exists, but back in our day you built the one computer you had and that was that. Now everyone has lots of computers. So maybe you don't make your own laptop but you can absolutely make a "computer" and hack all kinds of fun things.

See: Arduino, Raspberry PI, STM32 et al., Teensy, BeagleBone, TinyFPGA, etc. etc. etc.

Honestly, I am kinda jealous. You can buy more random electronics than I could've dreamed of as a kid with paper route money (do kids even still do that?). Test equipment too.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#169

Post by Jakobeha »

This looks a lot like existing co-op programs, where undergraduate students are hired as (typically paid) interns and take a break from classes while they work. AFAIK these programs usually work really well, to the point where my undergraduate college became very competitive and popular solely because of its co-op.

Co-op work is not classwork, so it removes the incentive for students to submit lazy contributions for bad grades. Yet co-op students actually benefit their companies because said companies continue to hire them.

Of course, the main difference with open-source is that nobody is paying the student. But still - either investors in FOSS can "hire" students to work on various open-source projects, or the students can choose to work unpaid (perhaps for less tuition, or part-time work on the side, to make ends meet). But I really think adopting a co-op model would be easier and more effective than trying it in the classroom.

Re: Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

#170

Post by fomine3 »

piokoch wrote: post #10

I only hope it would not be some kind of common sentiment "you have to contribute to an open source project to earn better grade or get a job". It will end up as Huawei Linux kernel "contributions" - a lot of pointless commits that are only a pain for project maintainers and bring zero actual value.

Context: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/26/linux_kernel_contribu...

Meanwhile Huawei is a real big contributor. https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/

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