FOSS Experiences and Reflections

For this blog post we were required to go find a new piece of open source software that interests us. Install it, and report back with any problems.

Our team collectively decided to install Django.  Lynn and I decided to follow a tutorial appropriately titled How To Tango With Django.  This tutorial is very thorough and I assumed it would be relatively easy/quick to work through chapters 1 and 2 of the tutorial, but we all know what happens when we assume...

Everything was going very smoothly until I was to install the Python Imaging Library.  Unfortunately I had dependency issues to work out.  I worked around this by installing Homebrew.  Homebrew is a package management system that makes installing software on my Mac a lot easier.  (It's also FOSS!)  Then typing in these commands:

$brew install gcc48
$pip install Pillow

These commands helped me finish installing the Django software successfully.  

I also downloaded and played with GIMP.  GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program, it is a image editor.  This installation was very quick.  I had three images that I needed to edit and this software really impressed me.  Also, any questions I had were easy to find answers to as there were a ton of tutorials on anything and everything.  GIMP seems to have quite the following.

Required reading:  The Cathedral and The Bazaar

The author of this 30+page essay is Eric Steven Raymond.  You can view his resume here.

This whole piece is about how the author inherited popclient and the lessons he learned as it evolved into a completely different program, Fetchmail.  During this process he tried to emulate Linus Torvald's style of development- "release early and often, delegate everything you can, and be open to the point of promiscuity". In all, Raymond provides the reader with 19 lessons that he learned throughout this process.  

Raymond quotes Brooks- an author we read last semester- the author of The Mythical Man-Month-throughout this piece,  and usually agrees with him up until the chapter titled "The Social Context of Open-Source Software".  Raymond states that if Brooke's Law ("adding manpower to a late software project makes it later") were "the whole picture, Linux would be impossible".  Raymond goes on to explain the concept of "egoless programming" which the author of The Psychology of Computer Programming, Gerald Weinberg, observed.  Egoless Programming:  "in shops where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere".  Raymond goes on to say that the bazaar method harnesses the full power of "egoless programming", negating the effect of Brooks's Law.  Brooks Law is not the be-all and end-all.

What I took away from this piece:
More heads are better than one.
Always listen to your customers.
Treat your beta-testers and co-developers well.
Use your charm...WINK.

Favorite lesson/ quote:
"Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery