OpenSource in a nutshell

Open SourceOpening the sourceSource is openSourcing the Open ? Wait, What ?!



Being the tech savvy college we are (in the most literal sense you can imagine) , it is most likely that you have heard about this buzzword a million times.




But, what in the world is open-source? It's a question most of us foster for quite a few of our initial months here.

If you haven't heard of Open Source software, wait that can't be, you must have heard and probably used Software with it's roots in open source. Firefox, Android, Chrome, LibreOffice, VLC all these giants are open source or derivative of wildly popular open source software.



Free and Open source software is software, for which the source code or "recipe" is freely available. This means that anyone can download it, modify it and share it!



But fret not! The saga has just begun!

The world of open-source brings with it not only free, accessible, modifiable code, but a community of developers, a whole host of coding styles, and people from around the globe who work together to improve software and code as a community.



This philosophy of sharing, and working for the greater good has helped volunteers and budding students such as yourselves grow as programmers, developers and people.



This near utopian philosophy has spawned community programs like the Google Summer of Code, Gnome Outreach Program for Women and Open Source and LUG communities, not unlike our very own OSDG.



This article hopes to briefly summarize some of these concepts and in turn hopes to explain, if not light the spark that motivates so many of the OpenSource volunteers who shamelessly toil day after day to help the community that has given them so much. As a part of the community of developers working on a software product you get to create software that can impact anywhere from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of users. You get the chance to work with some of the brightest minds of your day, Robert Love, Guido Van Rossum, Linus Torvalds might just be your co-developers! These are people who might feature in your personal "list of geniuses", well now you get the chance to work with them! You will meet people who will can code in LOLCODE and Shakespeare (SPL), (yes, they're programming languages) and you will get harassed by your mentor, who will obsess about the spaces in your coding style, but at the end of the day you got home and realize that you have met a crowd which wants you to and helps you to learn, innovate and appreciate. The feeling of satiety is unparalleled, and your work becomes it's own gratification.

For those of you with a favourite language and for those of you who have a language that is your pet peeve, fear not for in the vast world of open source, there are plenty of languages in the sea, err source tree. From traditional development languages like C++,Java, JavaScript and PHP to cryptic languages like perl , and beautiful languages like Lisp and Scheme and our personal favourites Python and C, The FOSS community has you covered.



For those of you with slightly more materialistic tendencies (wink wink!), some of the perks that come with working in open-source projects include $5000 in cold hard cash (just the way we like it too!) and free EuroTrips to places like Florence(EuroPython'13), London(MozFest'13) and Brno(GUADEC'13). Ofcourse you have to be a little better than the average contributor to get invited to the trips. You'll have to qualify for one of the open source Programs listed above (vis-a-vis GSoC, OPW), but you already knew you'd have to sing for your supper didn't you?



Ok! Now that we've baited you (hopefully). You must be wondering how one needs to go about all this funny business of contributing to this wretched thing called OpenSource.

Here is when we come in, the OSDG. (clever us, all the baiting was a setup for this!).



OSDG or the Open Source Developers Group of IIIT-Hyderabad, aims to promote Open-Source culture inside (and dare we hope outside?) the campus.

Our sole objective is not just to get everyone to selected for GSoC or GnomeOPW (it's bonus if you guys do though!), but to cultivate an environment that is conducive to passionate developers. And to this effect we hope to hold hackathons to facilitate creation of newer better solutions and foster a community which encourages collective learning, thinking and development as opposed to the undercutting competitive environment most of us are used to. We'll also be organizing informative sessions, brain-storming sessions and hackathons so that you can implement your ideas, because you know as Mr. Torvalds says, "Talk is cheap, show me the code."



"If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."



-Richard M. Stallman



Your friendly neighbourhood,

OSDG Admins
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