[ubuntu-in] open source software for contribution

[Kingsly John]

+++ Shrinivasan T [2011-10-16 13:50:32]:

> this is project time for students.
> 
> instead of buying projects from project centers, let us help them to
> contribute to any open source software.
> 
> need your help on listing the open source software in ubuntu for
> contributions.
> 
> please collect a list so that we can ask the students to contribute.


What is the need for a list? Every single project welcomes contributions. 

But this is an impractical idea.(And a very bad one at that)  

1) Students dumb enough to "buy projects" are obviously "special", and we
shouldn't try to mess with natural selection and should allow them to find
their own way to extinction and we'd be doing humanity a great disservice if
we hinder their speedy path to Darwin Awards.

2) Most students in India, even engineering students are used to being
spoon-fed. So making a list of projects and "asking them to contribute" will
just not work. FOSS projects are meritocracies, so even if they land a
"project", if the student isn't capable of contributing/can't finish his/her
contribution in time. They might still be left with no option to "buy
projects" to fulfill their college/university requirements.  (Whereas most
local companies won't mind giving a letter(out of pity), stating that
they were happy with the student's work even if they were a total failure.)

3) Most open source projects are driven by volunteers who don't
have the time to hand-hold/train these students on how to work. And if we
start sending hundreds if not thousands of students to attack the maintainers
of these software asking for "projects". The end result will be a gross
wastage of limited spare time that these contributors get.

4) Most colleges/universities are stuck in the dark ages and do not accept
open source contributions as a legitimate "project", because they don't come
with letterheads and rubberstamps.(I know of GSoC participants who have been
forced to a second project to satisfy the whims of the dinosaurs that run our
education system)

So please don't go around telling every student you know to contribute to
opensource software as a college project.

Tell them to participate in opensource, but not just for the sake of the
college project.

The smart students are already participating in programs like GSoC/Fedora
Summer of Coding and others and are doing a good job matching up with some of
the smartest students in the world. So we just need to get more students to
compete for those slots. 

And projects like  GSoC/Fedora Summer of Coding have someone from the project
who willing to spare time to mentor the students. This is a huge benefit for
students. We should be encouraging the students to prepare for and
participate in such programs. 

We need more programs like the Durgapur LUG's summer training program (
http://wiki.dgplug.org/index.php/SummerTraining ) which teach students how
things work in the opensource world, and prepares them to approach things the
right way. (For rather obvious reasons we don't want our gazillion students
spamming all the public lists and authors directly with sms-speak emails
"HAI! I CAN HAZ PROEJCTZ???PLZ?? KTHXBYE.")

And more importantly we should be educating the staff/management of these
colleges to accept opensource contributions as legitimate projects.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
TL;DR: If students are already "buying projects". We should let them go their
merry way. It is too late to help them. If they want to contribute to FOSS
projects, they need to be told/taught how to do it the right way and they
should do it through existing programs like GSoC/FSoC without wasting the
limited/valuable time of the project maintainers/contributors.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Kingsly

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Kingsly At Users Dot SourceForge Dot Net  -- http://kingsly.org/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-in/attachments/20111017/9b70be4d/attachment.pgp>