On 09/09/2011 03:40 PM, Bonnie MacKellar wrote:
Mark Guzdial’s blog on computer science education has a somewhat negative post today on the usefulness of involving undergrads in open source development.
Guzdial has posted similar sentiments about open source development before; see http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/72144-the-impact-of-open-source-on-computing-education/fulltext for Guzdial's older blog post, http://opensource.com/education/10/2/open-source-dangerous-computing-education for Greg's response, and http://lwn.net/Articles/374675/ for more reactions from the FOSS community.
My take: no, the world's not perfect, and neither is open source, but hey, neither is any school or company or job, and you need to "bust through" to get quality mentoring time no matter what you're doing where. Students had better be prepared for an imperfect world. Brokenness and politics and "inner circles" exist in any human institution; at least in the FOSS world you can *see* that dirty laundry better, pull it out and talk about it -- at the very least, overhear the conversations between "senior people" while you're figuring out how to participate in those same conversations.
Haters gonna hate. If FOSS works for you, use it. If it doesn't, don't. It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness -- and my favorite thing about this group is that we *do* light candles. No criticism can diminish that or take it away.
--Mel _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
