Introduction

In this week of Open Source Software Development, I made some major progress on our group project contributing to Oppia. Alongside that, we focused on the business side of open source—how companies engage with it, support it, and even profit from it. It was cool to shift gears from code to strategy and see how it all fits together.

Group Project: Oppia Contributions

I finally got my first Oppia pull request merged this week! It took a bit to get used to the flow—setting up the dev environment, dealing with linting, and running the full test suite before pushing anything. But once it was merged, it felt like a milestone. The issue I worked on involved improving part of the domain logic, and I learned a ton just from figuring out where everything lived in the codebase.

Right now, I’m looking for another good issue to pick up—ideally something that’ll help me explore a different part of the system, like frontend or state management. Everyone on my team is working on their own tasks, and we’re staying in sync through check-ins and GitHub comments. We’re also starting to outline what we’ll include in our final presentation for class.

Open Source & Business

This week’s topic—open source in business—was way more interesting than I expected. We watched a video asking the question: “Is Open Source a Business Model?” Spoiler: it’s not. At least, not directly. The main takeaway was that open source is a development model, not a revenue stream. But businesses build models around it.

I learned how companies like GitHub, MongoDB, and Red Hat succeed by offering extra value—things like enterprise support, cloud hosting, or paid tiers. They give away the core product, but charge for what’s around it. It was also interesting to think about how this benefits users and developers while keeping the software sustainable.

What really stood out is how much of the internet runs on open source—and how it’s not just a “nice to have,” but something strategic that businesses invest in. It made me think more about how I might want to work with open source in my own career, whether through contributions or even building something people can use.

Overall, this week gave me a clearer view of how open source fits into the larger tech ecosystem—both from a contributor perspective and a business one.