open source

what do YOU think about when you hear the term “open source”? what are some advantages of open vs. closed source, what are some potential problems with open source, why did you decide to register for a class about open source software development?

• I’ve considered Open-Source as one of the key spirits in the CS community. People decided to make their knowledge and works publicly so that the whole community can develop even faster.
• Open-Source can be a bad thing when the piece of software is meant to be used to make profit (the codebase of large companies should be kept strictly confidential); or it contains private, unsafe, or misleading information, which can result in negative impacts because it can be cloned, forked, and pulled so easily.
• I registered for this course because I want to make the code I write more readable and maintainable in the future, and make myself more familiar with the etiquette of open-source communities. I’ve been working on research projects in the last year, and the associated codebase often requires the collaboration of many people (they are not open-source, though). I believe taking this course will help me collaborate with others better.

projects

briefly talk about four open source projects that you regularly use or that influenced you in some way in the past (note, the projects do not have to be source code based) (Keep in mind that these blogs are publicly available to anybody who stumbles upon them. Make sure that the posts are appropriate.)

• One open-source project that I use the most is Huggingface Transformers. It’s a professional and efficient implementation of various transformer-based models, including Llama, BERT, etc.
• Sometimes I directly use the API in my own code; sometimes I read the code for inspiration, as it incorporates so many functionalities, being, highly modular and encapsulated, and utilizes a lot of tricks for acceleration.