First off I would like to welcome you to my blog, my name is Gustone Lewis a 4/5th semester student in the CTY program at Seneca College. After our first week of lectures in this course (OSD600) I was left a bit intimidated and unsure of whether I'm up for the challenge that this course will present me with. However I'm also excited to actually get a sample of the world of an Open Source Development and the environment that they work in.
We were presented with a few resources to better familiarize ourselves with Open Source, its history and a bit of information on the Mozilla Project. Of all the resources two in particular perked my interest:
The film "Revolution OS" fascinated me to see how the Open Source community got started and yet it coexists alongside another entity, the Free Software Foundation (started by Richard Stallman), in which they both believe that software should be "free" in a sense of freedom and not cost. Yet they differ in that the FSF believes that all software should be free and non-free software should not exist, the Open Source community believes that non-free software and free software should co-exist. From Eric Raymond's article "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" it was interesting to learn that the Open Source environment is similar to a Bazaar, seeming chaotic from a surface viewpoint yet it produces incredible results. It can because there is in fact some level of order just not as strict and hierarchic as the Cathedral model which is used mostly by proprietary developers (e.g Microsoft).
Overall I'm looking forward to this course and have confirmed my resolve to enjoy working in this course and with my fellow peers.
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