OSS Readings (Week 1-2) - Ender
Inessential Weirdnesses in Open Source Software
I think it is important to add to open source software culture but not replace the people who are already here, or else you lose out on technical expertise.
if you look at your own community with the eyes of an outsider...from the perspective of a specific group of people you'd like to recruit, what do you think might discourage them or make them uncomfortable?
I am a Linux user who expresses contempt towards Windows users. A professor of mine recently expressed contempt toward my Linux usage (re: contempt culture).
Honestly, none of this is necessarily wrong, but I'm not sure they should have been doing this in 2016. I feel like there were more pressing issues.
I'm sad that both the readings about the command line being unusable have been removed from the web. Instead, this gem is archived as a quoted which I will now quote:
GUIs aren't just "shiny": they are tools which help us remember what is possible.
goals for an open source community
do UX research if you're making an app you want people to use
ask people who drifted away what your community did wrong
Hacker school: introducing yourself to unfamiliar open source projects
Ah, so the (main?) goal of this work is to figure out whether the project is maintained, and if so, how.
I've intuitively been able to figure this out on my own. I thought this was going to be about code comprehension, which I would have found more interesting.
OSSTA Zine
I'm a huge fan of Kate Compton, so I'm pretty sure I already read this zine before.
Which reminds me - I need to zine my research!
I like that this zine contains, essentially, a list of everything that you would could/would ask someone to contribute to an open source project.
This is like a how-to guide for open source! I will come back to this in my free time.
Processing and FLOSS
Richard Stallman would be proud of you, Casey!
A lot of code, at this point, is open but not free or libre. It's great that Processing breaks this pattern.
The Art of Humanizing Pull Requests
Worms, Butterflies and Dandelions. Open source tools for the arts
I should go to an AFROTECTOPIA event! It seems fun/interesting.
Choi's plant diagrams representing the open source community remind me of the diagrams the RAND corporation made representing the connectivity of the Internet.
Your open source code is indeed a dandelion whose seeds will spread unpredictably.
My thesis is inspired by Pantograph. The authors that paper (and the associated code) were shocked that I had been positively affected by their work.
THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS
I've noticed this myself:
the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones
My ITP thesis is an open-source project: