-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Ales and I were at the Google Summer of Code Mentor summit at the Googleplex in Mountain View cA yesterday, this is a summery of the goings on as I experienced them, while they are still fresh in my mind. (Although I'm not sure how fresh *anything* is in my mind, given the party at the end...) Dynamic Extensions--- We sat in on a talk about experiences with using plug-in and/or dynamic extensions in open source projects. Various O/S projects using dynamic loading of shared objects to bring in substantial portions of their functionality. The expressed motivations are to (1) better modularize the core product, (2) keep extra dependencies out of the core product, and (3) divide licensing issues out. The common problems expressed were (1) managing interface versions, (2) sub-packaging and distribution of add-ons, and (3) documentation of the interface API for the add-on developers to use. Portability of the technical implementation was mentioned by some, with the common experience that libtool is not workable. Project Collaboration--- This talk was basically a case study of a case where a SoC project spanned two organizations: Joomla and Eclipse. Open Source in Universities--- There were several educators there from universities that use open source projects in a variety of ways. I think we are particularly keen on this as we in gEDA feel there is a dumbing down of the CS/EE curriculum by the big tool vendors. The attendees shared that concern. The academics that were present (a self selected lot to be sure) said that professors are open to having students work on projects that go into open source products. Some sort of outreach was suggested to contact individual professors with interesting problems in open source that independent-minded students can work on. They get the occasional student who can't get enough and would like to have some interesting candidate projects that they can hand out. Capstone projects are also a good fit for open-source work, according to the attendees. There were comments about using Open Source versions of domain tools for teaching about the workings of the domain (i.e. kernel source for teaching about operating systems) but the problem of big companies using free/non-free licensing tricks to prevent that is pretty universal. As for using open-source software as lab material, there are institutional barriers that even professors have trouble with, so that's tougher. Women in Open Source--- There was a panel of women involved with O/S discussing the shocking lack of women in the O/S arena. (Someone threw around the statistic that 30% of software developers are women, but 4% of O/S contributers are women.) It was clear to me that for the women in front of the room the big turn off was bad behavior on project mailing lists. They really harped on this. But then they said the lists for their projects did not have this problem. I heard nothing new here. Marketing Open Source Projects--- Ales and I were shocked to discover that there are O/S projects that have marketing departments:-O Beyond the usual outlets, i.e. slashdot and the usual Linux rags, There was also a Googler there who made some suggestions that using google adverts can be a very affordable way to get exposure. It was also pointed out that various trade shows often set aside a small set of free booths for open- source organizations to apply for. It was pointed out that free was not cheap because of the effort (and costs) of setting up and manning a booth (no free beer) and because the show selects the candidates that apply based on their perceptions of importance (no free speech). The big projects have used trade shows, though. - -- Steve Williams "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. steve at icarus.com But I have promises to keep, http://www.icarus.com and lines to code before I sleep, http://www.picturel.com And lines to code before I sleep." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD4DBQFHCjZ4rPt1Sc2b3ikRAsSFAJj6UZBCHYqUlDP+t4BkktSZpRNsAJ951Vse nYG+20vvWysyAXyMtCA+QA== =ciAa -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
