Week 11

Personalities in Open Source Projects

After reading an article about personalities in open source projects (see here), I learned a lot more about what goes on in open source projects. In particular, since open source communities are made up of people with different personalities, an open source project should aim to be inclusive of all them, so as to motivate them to participate in its community (and by extension, the project).

The article mentions several personality types and traits, such as being introverted or extroverted, preferring to be in flexible environments rather than in strict ones, and seeing things in objective or subjective ways. An open source project should be able to adapt to the preferences of all these different personality types. For example, a public forum is a great way for exchanging ideas in an open source community; however, people with introverted personalities may not be comfortable with communicating through such public means. As an alternative, the project should provide (as the article says) “personal outreach and communication strategies that are more private for ensuring inclusivity.”

The article made me more appreciative of all the different methods and tools that open source projects use. Not only do they expand the project’s compatibility with different computing environments/systems, but they also help to ensure that the project is inclusive of different types of people.

Interview with Linus Torvalds

I also read the article 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds this week. The main takeaways (that I got) are:

Linus’s philosophy for Linux is/was to “make it better and have interesting challenges”
Linus never had a long-term plan for Linux (he said he started Linux to “do something interesting until it does everything [he] needed, and then find something else to do”)
The Linux kernel developers have been around for a long time because they enjoy working on the kernel, not because no one else wants to work on it
Linus is confident that Linux will continue to do well for a long time (a quarter century) “because of the [open source community] and the problem space”
Linus believes that modern social media is a “disease”, that anonymity is overrated, and he sends most of the emails he receives to /dev/null
Although Linus was very outspoken back in the day, and said “silly stupid cr*p” all the time, he is quieter now since a lot of eyes are on him (so to speak)

Friday, April 5

We had our third in-class assessment and continued our discussion on Unix/Linux.

Tuesday, April 9

We continued the discussion on Unix/Linux.

Contributions

None this week.