Group Progress

This week, my group worked on finding new features to implement for Preswald. Since we started working in pairs, we’ve been able to get our PRs submitted for the features that we worked on. My partner and I worked on adding latex functionality to the project, and got the PR reviewed by the maintainers. Our next steps are to start implementing a new feature. My partner and I decided to add functionality to download the plots generated by plotly directly from the Preswald web app. This is so that users do not have to manually download the whole page as a pdf or manually crop the graphs.

My group and I also worked on the presentation slides of our group project. It covers information about us working on the project such as the timeline of our progress, features that we worked on, and reflections about our experience. We planned out what each of us want to talk about and are going to practice presenting it.

Open Source in Business/Film

During class, we watched a few talks that covered open source in business. The video that I watched was open source in film. I found that talk interesting because the guests talked about the progression of open source in film being very important to the films that we make today. What I found the most interesting is that a lot of studios used Unix based systems and the introduction of Linux introduced them to the concept of open source, thus bringing in newer options for studios. This included animation software like Blender and also software like FFmpeg.

Another talk that I found interesting was the talk about open core. Open core is free open source software that utilizes paid addons. I found this interesting because typically monetization is not associated with some open source projects, at least on the common user end.

During the in-class discussion, we talked about reasons that may make companies gravitate toward this business model. One talking point mentioned was that companies want to “hook” users into using the free functions of the software but then add new features that are useful that come at a price. Overall, open source is very important to business and will continue to be crucial to its development.