SSGRR 2001 Developing Open Source Software SSGRR 2001 Jim Hall, Founder, coordinator The FreeDOS Project

SSGRR 2001 What Is The Cathedral And The Bazaar? SSGRR 2001 Jim Hall, Founder, coordinator The FreeDOS Project

SSGRR 2001 Background  GNU Robots  GNU Emacs / Apollo  Freemacs 1.6g  DOS catgets  uPortal

SSGRR 2001 Background  The FreeDOS Project

SSGRR 2001 The Cathedral And The Bazaar

SSGRR 2001 The Model  Building the cathedral  Carefully crafted  Individual wizards  Small bands of mages  Working in splendid isolation  No version to be released before its time

SSGRR 2001 The Model  Building the bazaar  Differing agendas and approaches  Results in coherent and stable system  Succession of small miracles

SSGRR 2001 Open Source Software

SSGRR 2001 Open Source  Open Source  Free Software  Free Software = Open Source  Methodology v. theology

SSGRR 2001 Open Source Free Software GNU Emacs GNU Robots Linux FreeDOS DR DOS MS Windows Photoshop Crynwr OpenOffice StarOffice Xv Qt 1.0

SSGRR 2001 Open Source  Open Source = can view the source code  Free Software = freedom  View  Modify  Share  Re-use

SSGRR 2001 Open Source  What makes a good Open Source project?

SSGRR 2001 Projects  Every good project starts by scratching a personal itch  To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you

SSGRR 2001 Projects  Users should be co-developers  Rapid code improvement  Debugging  Given a large enough co-developer base, the fix will be obvious to someone (Mind share)

SSGRR 2001 Projects  Release early, release often  Not every release will be stable

SSGRR 2001 Projects  Project coordinator/maintainer  Listen to your users  Many heads are better than one

SSGRR 2001 Projects  Organization of the project  Make it easy to find everything:  Developers  Designers  Web gurus  Documentation

SSGRR 2001 Projects  Documentation!  Many projects split off a separate, related group  Linux Documentation Project  FreeDOS Documentation Project

SSGRR 2001 Projects  Bug tracking  Bugzilla  Bugzilla  Make it easy to report bugs  If cannot find bugs, you will get duplicates

SSGRR 2001 Projects  Make source code available!  CVS  CVS

SSGRR 2001 Projects  Respond to submissions  Best way to kill interest: “Thanks, but I was planning to add that myself, anyway.”

SSGRR 2001 Projects  “Open Source is not a magic bullet.” -jwz

SSGRR 2001 More Information

SSGRR 2001 Information    

SSGRR 2001 Questions? Jim Hall Jim Hall

SSGRR 2001 License  What makes a good license?

SSGRR 2001 License  Jim’s rules for Free Software: 1. I can see the source code 2. I can modify the source for my own needs 3. I can share my changes to help others 4. I can re-use the code to help other projects

SSGRR 2001 License  Examples of Free Software licenses:  GNU GPL  GNU LGPL  BSD  InfoZip

SSGRR 2001 License  Jim’s rule for Open Source: 1. I can see the source code

SSGRR 2001 License  Examples of Open Source licenses:  NPL  OpenDOS