Articles Introducing College Students to Open Source? 14
Michael Cray asks: "I'm an MIS student and a pro-Linux / Open Source guy. I've been trying to find an article, that serves as an introduction to Open Source, which my Professor could use in class. To me, Open Source is more philosophical than technical. Since this is an IDS/MIS course called 'Management of Information Systems', the professor picks articles from journals like the Harvard Review to be used in class. So if you are a teacher, what article would you use to present 'open source' in a college class room?" What articles have you found that would serve as a good introduction to Open Source? Documents like The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the GPL would be good intro pieces, but are there other pieces that might flesh out these two as an introduction to Open Source?
Mozilla Movie (Score:2)
I don't remember what it was called and it's probably fairly lame, but it might make a good introduction as far as from a class-room angle.
Re:Mozilla Movie (Score:3)
Sources (Score:4, Informative)
Here is a nice open source timeline:
http://www.linuxcertification.com/manpage/timel
The history of the open source initiative:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/history.html
Richard Stallman - 15 Years of Freedom
- 03-17-003-10-NW-LF
4 feature.html
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999
This important article from 98' is what introduced me to open source. This is when netscape was releasing their source.
http://dir.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/04/cov_1
How about a textbook!?:
Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman
Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
Re:Sources (Score:2, Interesting)
High profile information (Score:1, Informative)
The original poster seems to suggest that his professor uses articles from magazines that Fortune 500 executives would read. The question would be more, what high profile or "high brow" publications contain good articles as an introduction to open source?
On another note, I wouldn't agree that the text of the GPL would be a good introduction to open source. It's in legalese, and the subtleties would be too many and obscure for an introduction-style classroom environment. The GPL FAQ [fsf.org] is a great complement, though. On the other hand, "The Catherdral and the Bazaar" is a top class introduction to the philosphy of open source development. Has it ever been reprinted in the Harvard Review or another similar magazine?
Éibhear
a few ideas (Score:4, Informative)
The Cathedral and the Bazaar is probably the best (it's also what my class used)
In general, don't make it into a religious war. MIS students generally are more interested in business than programming, so preaching to them about being able to see the source for everything is largely worthless when you're talking to a crowd that holds dear to "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
Instead, if you want to get their attention/interest, put the discussion into terms that interest them - lower cost of ownership, more choice of vendors, etc. If you can't discuss it in a way that they'll find interesting and relevant to what they want to do with their lives, you'll just be wasting your time.
Don't show them anything/anyone that would help to reinforce the oft-widespread belief that open source advocates are childish and immature.
Broken Link! (Score:1)
Why not this one [tuxedo.org], though?
practicality, not religion (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd likely be better off presenting it as a practical alternative, not a quasi-religion.
There are good, legitimate, practical reasons for using OSS - don't gloss over them in favor of dogma.
Open Sources (Score:2, Informative)
Publisher : O'Reilly
Pub Date : January 1999
ISBN : 1-56592-582-3
Pages : 280
Should be about $25, good essays and stuff in it about where things are headed and where things came from.
Re:Open Sources (Score:2, Informative)
Better still, remaining in the spirit of the texts inside , the whole book is available for free from the O`Reilly site.
Get it here [oreilly.com].
Setting Up Shop (Score:3, Informative)
some academic literature on OSS (Score:2, Informative)
Wegberg, M., Berens, P. (2000) Competing communities of users and developers of computer software: competition between open source software and commercial software, NIBOR working paper, NIBOR/RM/00/001, http://www-edocs.unimaas.nl/files/nib00001.pdf
Weber, S. (2000), The Political Economy of Open Source Software, BRIE Working Paper 140, E-conomy Project Working paper 15
Tuomi, I. (2001), Internet, Innovation, and Open Source; Actors in the Network, First Monday, volume 6, number 1, http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_1/tuomi/inde
Moon, J.Y., Sproul, L. (2000), Essence of Distributed Work: The Case of the Linux kernel, First Monday, volume 5, number 11, http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_11/moon/inde
Mockus, A., Fielding, R.T., Herbsleb, J. (2000), Case Study of Open Source Software Development: The Apache Server, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering, Limerick Ireland, June 5-7, pp. 263-272, http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/mockusapache.pdf
Lerner, J., Tirole, J. (2000), The Simple Economics of Open Source, Working Paper 7600, National Bureau Of Economic Research
Kuwabara, K. (2000), Linux: A bazaar at the edge of Chaos, http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_3/kuwaba
Johnson, K. (2001), A Descriptive Process Model for Open-Source Software Development [DRAFT], http://sern.ucalgary.ca/students/theses/KimJohnso
Arief, B., Gacek, C., Lawrie, T. (2001), Software Architectures and Open Source Software - Where can Research Leverage the Most?, Centre for Software Reliability, Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, http://opensource.ucc.ie/icse2001/ariefgaceklawri
Blechermann, B. (1999), The cathedral versus the Bazaar (with apologies to Eric S. Raymond), An economic analysis and strategic look at Open-Source Software, http://www.ite.poly.edu/htmls/chapel_printable.ht
ITBWTCL (Score:1, Informative)