DPS909 and OSD600 Fall 2009 Weekly Schedule

Introduction

The fall is broken into two parts. First, general open source and and community (i.e., Mozilla) specific skills and ideas are taught. Students learn how to deal with the tools, techniques, and practices of their chosen project and its community. Second, students are taught about extensibility models, and how to write Add-ons and Extensions.

Part I – Essential Open Source Development Skills and Concepts

Week 1 (Sept 1) Course introduction

• Course introduction
• Intro to open source
• Intro to Mozilla project
  • Mozilla Project Overview
  • Community, Foundation, Corporation
  • The Mozilla Manifesto
  • Mozilla platform and technologies

• Readings/Resources
  • "Cathedral and Bazaar" by Eric Raymond
  • "Revolution OS" [film] (see also http://www.revolution-os.com/ or QA 76.9.A25 R68 2003)
  • Mike Shaver discusses the Mozilla Manifesto [MP3]
  • Article about Mozilla and Firefox in the New York Times

• TODO
  • Complete readings and watching/listening to this weeks resources.
  • Create an account on this wiki for yourself
  • Create a personal wiki page on this wiki, and add a link for yourself to the People page and the
  • Create a blog (wordpress or blogspot or whatever) and create a feed category or tag called "open source"
  • Read the Blog Guidelines for instructions on how to use your blog in the course
  • Add your blog feed and info to the Open Source@Seneca Planet List so that it appears in the OpenSource@Seneca Planet
  • Blog on your reactions to the readings for this week, and also introduce yourself.
  • Begin learning how to use IRC for communication. We'll cover this in detail next week, but it's better to get started early.