Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this TAU course or with TAU. I brought this issue up because it interested me to see such a workshop existing, and because I know a student who's taking it and looking for a genuinely useful project to undertake.
On Sun, Jul 06, 2003, Alexander Maryanovsky wrote about "Re: Looking for ideas for free-software projects": > You don't specify and characterize "the problem" front, except maybe in a > very vague form, you don't design all the application modules up front, you > don't list and schedule resources and people up front, and you most > certainly don't have to decide on the technologies, development environment >.. > Also, what is this requirement to develop on Linux? Linux != Open Source! > Open Source is much, much bigger than Linux. Please keep in mind that this is a university project, done by relatively inexperienced people (not people with 10 years experience with free software) during a short time frame, so you shouldn't compare it to the Linux kernel project, for example. The requirements you disagree with are probably just formalistics, for the teacher to be able to see that the students are heading off to a good start and forcing them to learn a bit about the development tools *before* they start developing. I doubt that points will be taken off if the students end up debugging with "ddd" after initially claiming that they will be debugging with "gdb". Linux is probably just a requirement so that the teacher could have a common language with the students and be able to check what the students did. It shouldn't matter because 95% of all free software (just an estimate I made up) works on Linux in addition to other systems. The amount of Windows-specific or FreeBSD-specific free software, or whatever, is not very large. Another bonus point for Linux (and again, I'm just making this up, I don't even know who the teacher of this workshop is) is that using it basically *forces* you to give thought to the free software issue. If you program on Windows, using a commercial compiler and a commercial editor and whatever, you don't see much free software and you don't get to think much about free software. This is just a generalization, of course, but it is still generally true ;) > Sorry about the (slightly offtopic) rant, but it doesn't seem to be that > this workshop will actually teach anyone the true spirit of Open Source > (which is usually developing something fun, for the heck of it, no? Yes, > there are other reasons for people to write OS code, but this seems the > most "popular" one). I don't think a graded workshop/course *can*. Only > coming up with a cool idea and diving into it can. You can't teach the "spirit" of something. But you can demonstrate it, and hopefully some people will find that free software is indeed good and fun. What you said isn't specific to this workshop - according to what you said, graded courses are always bad and you can never end up loving a subject you learned got acquainted with in a graded course. I'm sure that most university professors will disagree with you on that. Besides, who said free software is always written *just* for fun? There is many times other alterior motives, like fame or money, or in this case, a good grade. > Alexander Maryanovsky, a first year TAU student, btw :-) Maybe you should join that workshop - it looks like you already have an idea for free software! -- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Jul 6 2003, 7 Tammuz 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |What's the greatest world-wide use of http://nadav.harel.org.il |cowhide? To hold cows together. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
