Open Source Comes to Campus/Curriculum/Saturday/Ethics and history

(General note: At Penn, the way we structured this was as a conversation between two of the teachers, as a full group.)

Structure: All students are in one room. Asheesh lectures initially. Teachers talk for a while and answer the questions that students ask.

• Lecture:
  • Importance of software transparency (example: Skype)
  • Importance of customizability (example: Dance Dance Immolation)
  • History of "free software" movement...
  • ...simultaneous to Linux pioneering a world of actual collaboration
  • History of the "open source" fracture, and how it dominates
  • Explanation of a few different business models around open source, and how the finances work out (individual consulting; huge support organizations like Red Hat; hosting a service like WordPress.com; Debian, where the "center" has no business model)

• Teachers re-introduce themselves briefly, and explain in 4 minutes or fewer how they initially got involved in contributing (in any way: documentation, code, design, etc.) to an open source project; what their motivations are; and how they are paid (if at all) for open source work.
  • To avoid a catastrophe of slow talking, we might require slides from teachers for this.

• Student Q&A.

Assessment: None.