User:Smoussavi

Revision as of 17:24, 11 November 2014

Shamsi Moussavi is a computer science Professor at Massachusetts Bay Community College. MassBay is small college with three campuses in Wellesley, Framingham, and Ashland MA. Computer Science department is located in Wellesley and CS, CIS, IT (with management focus), and IT (with technology focus) associate degrees. Shamsi teaches Java programming, data structures, software design, and security courses.

Shamsi has more than ten years of industry experience as principal member of technical staff with GTE and Verizon. This is shamsi's eleventh year of full time teaching position, with almost five years of part time teaching while working in industry. She enjoys reading and traveling when time permits.

Part A:

1. --- While reading the documents listed in Intro to FOSS, I learned a lot about the definitions and history of FOSS, specially from the "what is free software" article. It was also interesting to read expectation2 and being productively lost. I felt that I was already productively lost with all the detail information that I was reading; while always assuming that I already know about FOSS.

The social context of FOSS, is the reason why I was so excited to take part in this workshop, not only for my students but also for myself. I give students projects that involves solving problems for other people whom they know (software to help the nursing faculty, our dean, the disability office), but it seems that is the extent of their view of social context for a programmer and more importantly, the responsibility that comes with it.

I admit I am guilty of #3 and #4 in the list (practical OSS exploration), because I, myself have not actually participated in an open source project. I am hoping that by the end of this workshop I will gain the courage to do so, for myself and my students.

Humanitarian FOSS, as I mentioned, is my focus and was difficult to pick on from the list, as they all were great projects. But, I have decided to work on OpenMRS project.

3. --- I was not able to edit my wiki page. :(

4. --- I had some problems completing the IRC activity. Of course, one big problem was that I could not add anything to the wiki, since step 3 didn't work. I use a MAC and installed Colloquy and had to deal with a couple of issue regarding that, but when I started it, didn't know what the chat room was, as it didn't give a list for the given channel. When I joined the channel for openMRS, it didn't seem to have any activity, making me wonder if I am in right place.

6. --- reading and checking the links for the two example projects gave me an idea of what it takes to establish a FOSS and line up the tools required. A lot of work!

Even though reporting on part 1 was not required, I felt I needed to write what I thought; otherwise, the whole exercise would have become a history itself.

Part B:

1. --- The field trip required us to enter our findings on the wiki, but since I had problem with wiki, I am posting everything here.

Part 1 - SourceForge - I searched for security games, because that is the project that my students are working on. The list of project was many pages long and included 152 projects. They were written in 15 different programming languages and the top 4 were: C++, Java, C, and C#.

- The meaning of each status was pretty self explanatory and other than inactive, the rest were written in reverse order of actual phases, which is: planning (17), pre-alpha (20), alpha (24), beta (30), production/stable (56), mature (5). The numbers in parenthesis indicate the number of games in that status.

- I picked "CodeGroup" (Planning with 4 downloads) and "InternetCaptcha" (mature with 79 downloads). I thought it was interesting that even though CodeGroup was in planning stage, it had 4 downloads, which I assume means at least 4 people are working on it.

- Projects with most downloads and commits are considered most used, I assume.

- I picked "Universal password manager", which stores passwords and is written with Java and Swing. This is probably used by those familiar with open source and trusting it, as I see my students use the famous software called Keeppass, which is similar in functionality. The project was updated on 2/25/14 and had 269 downloads when I was checking it, which says it is pretty active; although it only had one commit. I would use this software to try it before I tell my students; however, I am not convinced that software that stores password is a secure way of keeping passwords.

Part 2 - Ohloh The main languages used to write Mifos are Java, PHP, and XML, but 19 different languages are used in total to write it. XML has the second highest number of lines of code and Perl has the highest comment ratio. It consists of 2,673,467 lines of code. It has 161 contributors, but every time I tried to see the map of the location of contributors, the map disappeared. The average number of contributors in the last 12 months are 17 (with 67 average commits in 12 months) and for the past 5 months to 1 year, the top three contributors have been involved in this project.

2. --- Project Evaluation Activity