I didn’t have a defined understanding of what open source was before taking this course. Vaguely, I knew that it was free and maintained by a community. Still, open source projects such as Wikipedia and git have provided a lot of valuable services for me, all for free, and I’ve always been quite grateful for that.

I am aware that open source has its weaknesses. Not having control over what your work is used for has the potential for some incredibly unsavory outcomes. It also intuitively seems to remove a big source of motivation for people to produce something useful, though the large number of high-quality open-source projects out there seems to be an obvious counterpoint to this.

Still, as a consumer, it’s always nice to have things for free, particularly if I would have otherwise not had access to such a service. For instance, if there wasn’t a free alternative to Photoshop, that wouldn’t mean I would suddenly be able to afford to pay hundreds of dollars per year for it. On a less selfish note, with very little preventing producers from injecting unscrupulous money-grubbing features into their products, it’s good to have a free alternative available that provides a base threshold for product quality.

This is why I decided to register for an open source software development class. I support the mission of many of these projects, and I can code, so why not contribute to them? Well, for now, it’s mostly because it’s hard to see how little old me could possibly do anything useful for these huge established projects. That’s why I hope to get an understanding of the needs and norms around open source software development from this class, that will allow me to make meaningful contributions.

When I program, I use VS Code and git, and I’m often working on Linux and using Docker containers. My academic and professional work is therefore pretty much built on open source. As I said before, I’m quite grateful for these and many other available open-source tools for lowering the threshold to participate in all kinds of activities that involve coding, as well as providing solid, no-nonsense products that are just, well, usable. No subscription, no constant ads, no purposefully included compatibility challenges - just usable, just like that. We could use more of that simplicity right now, I think.