Picking a Project (A.K.A. My FOSS Preferences)

As I sit in the school computer lab I ponder to myself, "what type of free software/open source user/advocate am I?" Am I the Richard Stallman, or the Bill Gates? I think like most people I would consider myself in the middle ground. Not filled with disgust of closed source, but prefer open source when a good/reliable project can fulfill my need. An example of this would be LibreOffice or GIMP. Even though I would only consider myself in the middle of the spectrum I do love learning about the Open Source Movement and believe in everything they stand for. I actually tried to work on a few projects over winter break, but I'm still working on the patches before I submit them back into the project. So taking this all in consideration I believe I have picked my top three projects that I would like to work on for my CSCI 462 class at CofC: Obsidian, Melange, and Processing.

Obsidian (links will be provided when our job is done) is a project created by Hunter with Dr. Bowring's guidance. Without getting into too much detail about the project before it is released, it will help create a framework for test engineers to create unit tests. What I do feel comfortable talking about is what our team would be doing for the project. As hunter said in his post a team is forming, and one that I think meshes really well. Joanna and Micah are people I have wanted to work on a project with for a while now and last semester I had the pleasure of working with Laryea (who was on a team with hunter and myself) for our 362 project. Our work for 462 would be a little different than the rest of the class. Instead of contributing to an existing project we will (hopefully) be creating an open source community around the project (if Dr. Bowring puts us on a team together). Now what does that entail? We would have to create an open community that people would want to join. Seeing as how I have studied and advocated (and with some luck contributed to) open source in the past I feel like I have a decent grip on what a community should have as well as what it should try to avoid. Things we would be working on include: making the existing code base available and accessible to newcomers, working on a wiki page to keep a knowledge base that users and contributes can use to learn about the project, creating modes of communication with the developers (us for now) with mailing groups/IRC rooms/FAQ's, creating a way of tracking bugs and feature requests, and of course making the project better by adding features and fixing bugs. This is my number one pick seeing as how I have been begging to see/work on it since last semester when I first saw output of it for our 362 project and with my knowledge on open source I think I would be a great asset to the project.

Melange is a framework that creates "a framework for representing Open Source contribution workflows". If you have ever contributed to Google Summer of Code you have been on a Melange powered site. Melange is powered by Google App Engine (for now) and I believe that creating a framework that other open source projects can use to create a workflow for contributions is a noble cause. I know of one or two students who currently work on the project or have done so in the past and they all say that the work is challenging but rewarding, and seeing as how programmers are constantly looking for a challenge and get joy from challenging problems as well as being optimists during the whole ordeal, I want the challenge and sense of accomplishment that my fellow peers have felt.

My third project that I would want to work on is Processing. Processing is the project that I helped create a test framework for last semester. It is an "open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions." It is written in Java and works on a multitude of platforms including Android and in web browsers with Javascript enabled. The idea of working on a tool that can help students learn programming as well as artists create works of art is the original reason I picked this project last semester, and that passion for helping other people is still there for me.

Both Melange and Processing are projects that have a medium (10-40) number of developers actively working on them, while Obsidian will only have the students in the group working on it (at first). I would be happy to work on any of these projects and if I work on Obsidian I might (in my spare time) work on the other two projects as well to get more ideas on how to run an open source project.