Day Three

On the third day, we got to deliver to the class our top three candidates for our Open Source project choice this semester.  I started off by speaking about our third choice: Open Office for Kids.  We decided not to go with Open Office for Kids, because it seemed that it would be difficult to communicate with the community (considering that most of the developers were French).  SugarLabs was our number one choice by far (and it turns our we're not the only group), and I'm very excited about jumping into the development process.

For the next half of class, we spent some time looking into more detail about SugarLabs.  We managed to join the IRC chat just to get a feel for how that works.  We also found out about a weekly meeting for SugarLabs on Thursday nights, so tomorrow night we will all be joining the IRC chat to see what's going on.  We also found the mailing list on their website for developers, so we went ahead and signed up for that as well.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar was an interesting read.  Throughout the reading, Raymond lists small tips for Open Source software, coming his experiences as a programmer over the last 25-30 years.  Here's some of the tips that I found most useful:


"Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging."  -  With Open Source software, if you keep the user invested in your product, they will most likely be more interested in helping continue the software development process (fixing bugs, new features, etc.).

"Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers." -  Listening to the customer is very important, because most of the time the customer has a lot to say.  I can say from personal experience (working at Hawkes Learning Systems), that the customer always likes to give their two cents about our product (whether it be new features to release, or things they don't like -- any feedback is good).

"To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you." - This is very true, and is also why we decided to go with SugarLabs for our project.  Doing something that you want to do makes the process feel less like a job and more like an enjoyable experience to learn from.

Overall, Raymond has a lot of great things to say about Open Source Software in the Cathedral and the Bazaar.