Introduction to Oss in the University

Hello. My name is Tim Budd. I'm an associate professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University. Some of you may know my name from my textbooks on programming languages, object-oriented programming, and data structures. But at heart I'm an academic, and my thoughts continually turn to trying to figure out what I can do to help prepare my students for the world they will face after graduation. Lately I've become interested in open-source development, and open source communities.

There are many ways that participation in open source development projects is useful to the college student. Too much of college computer science is focused on the code, and on individual development. FOSS projects help students learn about working in a community (both physically and temporally distributed), finding how their small bit of the project fits into a larger whole, and generally working well with others. FOSS projects also scale well. Students can begin by simply reading code, contributing small minor bug fixes (kernel janitor type projects). As their confidence level increases, they can move on to increasingly larger and more substantial projects. In a future column I will discuss the various ways that FOSS is finding its way into the university. My chairman has a term for this sort of scalability, she calls it a “Platform for Learning” (tm). Dave Patterson, the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery, has in a letter printed in the flagship journal of that organization listed a course in open source development as the number one course he would like to go back to college and take.

Despite the obvious (to me, at least) advantages of giving students experience in open source development in the academic setting, such experience has been surprisingly slow to take hold. I believe there are a number of reasons for this, on both sides of the industry/academic divide. I will take up this topic in future columns.

In the meantime, I would really like to make connections with anybody with similar experiences. If you are an academic who has tried integrating FOSS into your curriculum, drop me a note and tell me about your experiences. Hopefully we can share ideas (and horror stories), and help improve things for the benefit of both our students and the field as whole.

You can reach me via this blog, or write directly at budd-at-acm.org