This is a project course, and the majority of each student’s mark will come from work done on a real development project. The primary goal of this project is to get students involved in the Mozilla/OpenOffice.org /Eclipse WTP development community and codebase. Through this experience students will learn about the processes, tools, and practices involved in developing software as part of a large open source community.

Third, consider the sharp dividing line between student projects in most programming courses. For the most part, students are evaluated on their ability to do a particular project or to solve a particular problem on their own. The outcome is measured against peer outcomes. However, in this course students are not in competition with their peers; rather, they are all working on one large project (i.e., Mozilla or OpenOffice.orgor Eclipse WTP) with many sub-projects within it. As a result, there is no clean line to divide one student’s work from another, or even student work from that of the open source community. This means that collaboration between students and even other members of the open source community is acceptable practice.