DPS909 & OSD600 Fall 2017

Resources for DPS909 & OSD600

Week 1

• Course introduction
  • DPS909
  • OSD600

• Some questions:
  • What brought you to this course?
  • When you hear "open source," what comes to mind?
  • On a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very)...
    • How comfortable are you working with technology you've never seen before?
    • How likely are you to stick with a problem when it gets hard to solve?
    • How curious are you about how things work?
    • How likely are you to ask for help when you get stuck?
    • How likely are you to pause your own work in order to help someone else who is stuck?
    • How comfortable are you as a writer?
    • How self-motivated are you?
    • How self-directed are you?

• How to have Success in this course:
  • Willingness to be lost and not panic
  • Willingness to put yourself out there, jump in
  • Curiosity
  • Being driven, persistence
  • Willingness to ask for help
  • Willingness to give others help
  • Independent learning
  • Doing more than the bare minimum

• Mozilla
  • Browsers (Firefox, Servo)
  • Languages (JavaScript, C++, Node, Python, Rust, CSS, HTML, ...)
  • Tools (Dev Tools, DXR, build systems, automation)
  • QA, Automated Tests
  • Extensions
  • Localization
  • Documentation
  • Accessibility
  • Teaching and Learning (Thimble)
  • Web technology

• Discussion
  • Move Over Bay Street: Toronto's Burgeoning Tech Scene Is Taking Over
  • Five things undergrads can do now to prepare to enter the job market
  • Open source professionals are more in demand than ever
  • How to get an open source job
  • Frontend Engineer role at Stripe

• Lab 1

Week 2

• Let's talk about Copyright and Open Source Licenses
  • • IANAL: "I Am Not A Lawyer"
    • We're going to explore licensing from the POV of a developer participating in open projects

• Copyright
  • Who created it, "owns" it.
  • Set of exclusive rights granted to the work's creator
  • "The right to copy," to produce or reproduce a work or substantial portion thereof
  • Copyright is automatic when a work is created, you don't have to register it.
  • Copyright in Canada
  • Copyright Guide
  • In a software project, there can be many copyright holders (e.g., many contributors), or all contributors may assign their copyright to the project (e.g., CLA, which we'll cover later)

• Licenses
  • Rights, privileges, responsibilities, etc. applicable to someone other than the work's creator
  • "Terms and Conditions"
  • These must be granted by a copyright holder

• No License
  • What can you do with code you find that has no license?
  • what can I, can't I do?

• Public Domain
  • SQLite, which is now used by literally everybody, see http://www.sqlite.org/famous.html
  • Unlicense

• Consider some proprietary/closed End User License Agreements (EULA)
  • Richard Dreyfuss reads the iTunes EULA
    • Part 1: Please Read (.mp3)
    • Part 2: Responsibility (.mp3)
    • Part 3: Damages (.mp3)
    • Part 4: Effective Until (.mp3)
  • Spotify EULA

• Open Source Licenses
  • The Open Source Definition
  • Approved licenses by the Open Source Initiative: https://opensource.org/licenses
  • Choose a License: https://choosealicense.com/

• Learning Licenses: BSD
  • Family of Licenses, including 2-Clause BSD, 3-Clause BSD (aka New BDS), 4-Clause BSD
  • "Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project"
  • BSD Licenses code is usually compatible with other open/closed code, when you want to mix them.
  • Example software projects licensed under the BSD License:
    • Many Google Projects, including V8, Chromium, Go
    • D3.js
    • Django
    • nginx
    • Vi
    • Facebook uses a modified version of the 3-Clause BSD they call [BSD + Patents license]. This has been controversial
      • BSD + Patent
      • PATENTS in React
      • https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining-react-s-license/
  • Summary:
    • You need to retain the license and copyright notice
    • You can use it commercially or non-commercially (privately)
    • You can distribute it freely
    • You can modify it freely

• Lab 2

Week 3

• Learning Licenses: MIT
  • MIT License
  • One of the most widely used licenses in Open Source
  • Like the BSD License, nothing about patents (created before software was patentable in the US)
  • Example software projects licensed under the BSD License:
    • Ruby on Rails
    • A-Frame
    • AngularJS
    • Atom, Electron
    • Bootstrap
    • Brackets
    • jQuery
    • node.js
    • Phaser
    • PuTTY
    • Socket.IO

• What is a bug?
  • Unit of Work in Open Source
  • Many projects have lots of bugs
  • Steps To Reproduce (STR)
  • Metadata (OS, versions, other context)
  • Issue vs. Pull Request
  • Labels

• • Let's look at some bugs
    • A-Frame Issues on GitHub
    • Thimble Issues on GitHub
    • Mozilla's Bugzilla
    • Mozilla ORG on GitHub
  • Some interesting example bugs:
    • Internationalize Best Resume Ever
    • An example of a good-first-bug in DevTools
    • Recent Firefox fix for nsCursor(-1)
    • Dead code removal in FlacFrameParser::DecodeHeaderBlock
    • Hostile bugs filed by angry users. cf. Bug Etiquette, Bug Writing Guidelines
    • Dealing with the iPhone X "notch" in CSS standard, see examples
    • RESOLVED WONTFIX
  • Bug Triage. Example bug that needs Triage.

• • "Good First Bug"
    • The good and bad of "Good First Bug"
    • Mozilla GitHub ORG good-first-bug and goodfirstbug and "good first bug"
    • Mozilla DevTools "easy" Issues
    • Bugs Ahoy! unowned, simple bugs from Bugzilla
    • Mozilla Bugzilla Unassigned Good First Bugs

• Write a Blog post: read MIT License followed by The MIT License, Line by Line, and blog about 3 things you learned or found interesting, which perhaps differed from what you understood in your own reading of the license.
• Lab 3

Week 4

• Facebook, React, Apache, BSD+Patents, MIT
  • https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/17/apache_says_no_to_facebook_code_libraries/
  • https://ma.tt/2017/09/on-react-and-wordpress/
  • https://code.facebook.com/posts/300798627056246/relicensing-react-jest-flow-and-immutable-js/
  • https://ma.tt/2017/09/facebook-dropping-patent-clause/amp/

• Mozilla
  • Started in 1998 by former Netscape employees, see Code Rush documentary
  • Mozilla Public License (MPL) (in plain English)
  • Mozilla Manifesto
  • MDN
  • Bugzilla
  • Mozilla@GitHub

• 0.1 Release
• Lab 4

Week 5

• Learning Licenses: GPL
  • Free Software, FSF, GNU
  • Copyleft, compare to permissive licenses like BSD, MIT
    • "Copyleft thus uses copyright law to accomplish the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of imposing restrictions, it grants rights to other people, in a way that ensures the rights cannot subsequently be taken away."
  • GPL License
    • GPL-2.0
    • GPL-3.0
  • Key Ideas
    • Free to use, modify (see below), redistribute, study, copy
    • Binary distributions must also make source code available (e.g., Linksys, BMW)
    • You can modify GPL code and not publish your changes. But if you release your modified binary, you must make source available.
    • You can sell GPL licensed code, and so can anyone else.
    • You can't sublicense GPL code: it has to stay GPL
    • GPL3 is more compatible with other open licenses than GPL2
  • Example software projects licensed under the GPL Licenses:
    • Audacity
    • Drupal
    • emacs
    • Linux Kernel
    • gcc
    • Notepad++
    • WordPress