DPS909 & OSD600 Fall 2017
Resources for DPS909 & OSD600
Week 1
- 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
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)
- 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:
- 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
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:
- 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
- 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"
- 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
- 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
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." Wikipedia
- GPL License
- 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:
- Introducing git
- Readings/Resources
