FOSS Field Trip Activity V1

Revision as of 15:30, 10 February 2013

FOSS Field Trip Activity

Title: Browsing A Forge

Description

Learners will gain an understanding of the breadth of available FOSS projects. Learners will also gain an understanding of the identifying characteristics of FOSS projects including pattern of contributions, patterns of commits, programming languages used, and more.

Source

Detailed FOSS Field Trip

Prerequisite Knowledge

None.

Learning Objectives

Ability to:

• Locate a FOSS project on SourceForge and Ohlog.
• Describe basic features of the project including start date, programming language, code size, and recent activity.
• Compare two similar FOSS projects based on same criteria.

Materials/Environment

• Access to Internet/Web and web browser.

Background

Open source pre-dates the Web, but the Web and Internet connectivity have been essential for the blossoming of FOSS in recent years. FOSS projects need to be available on the Web to ever gain much attention. There is a growing number of sites (often called “forges”) that provide a home and visibility to FOSS projects (although many of the biggest projects live on their own sites).

Directions

Part 1 - SourceForge

Perhaps best known of these FOSS sites is Source Forge. In this activity you will explore projects in SourceForge to gain an understanding of the key characteristics of a FOSS project.

Do the following:

1. Go to: http://sourceforge.net/
2. Use the Search feature in the center of the screen to view applications in an area of interest to you (e.g., gaming, sports, music, computing, etc.).
3. How many projects are there in this category?
4. How many different kinds of applications are there?
5. How many different programming languages are used to write software in this category?
6. List the top four programming languages used to write programs in this category.
7. How many of the projects in this category are written in the programming language of your choice?
8. Identify the meaning of each of the statuses below:
   1. Inactive
   2. Mature
   3. Production/Stable
   4. Beta
   5. Alpha
   6. Pre-Alpha
   7. Planning
9. Compare two projects in this category that have two different statuses. Describe the differences between the statuses.
10. Which projects are the most used? How do you know?
11. Pick a project in your category. Answer the questions below:
    1. What does it do?
    2. What programming language is the project written in?
    3. Who is likely to use the project? How do you know this?
    4. When was the most recent change made to the project?
    5. How active is the project? How can you tell?
    6. How many committers does the project have?
    7. Would you use the project? Why or why not?
12. Look for projects that have a humanitarian purpose. That is, projects for which the primary purpose is to provide some social benefit such as economic development, disaster relief, health care, ecology. Examples include Mifos, Sahana and OpenMRS.
13. Find several additional examples of humanitarian FOSS projects.
14. Pick one humanitarian FOSS and look at the data available about it.
15. How would you decide whether it was worth using?
16. How would you decide whether it was worth contributing to as an IT professional?

Part 2 - Ohloh

Comparison of Epiphany, Firefox and K-Meleon using Ohloh.net In this activity, you’ll explore some of the development characteristics of web browsers, one of which was presented today including the number of developers and the programming languages used in each.

Explore Epiphany:

1. Go to: http://www.ohloh.net/
2. In the upper-most search space, enter: Epiphany
3. Click on the Epiphany logo.
4. What is the main programming language used in Epiphany?
5. How many lines of code does Epiphany have?
6. Click on the World Activity Map (lower right side of screen). List some of the locations of the developers:
7. Go back to the main Epiphany page and click on the “Code Analysis” link under right-hand DEVELOPMENT menu.
8. What other languages is Epiphany written in?
9. What language has the second highest number of lines of code?
10. Of the programming languages used in Epiphany, which language is the most highly commented?
11. Click on the “Contributors” link under right-hand COMMUNITY menu.
12. How long have the top three contributors been involved in the project?
13. Click on the “Managers” link under right-hand COMMUNITY menu.
14. How many managers does the project have?

Explore Firefox:

1. Go back to the Ohloh main page: http://www.ohloh.net/
2. In the upper-most search space, enter: Firefox
3. Click on the Firefox logo.
4. What is the main programming language used in Firefox?
5. How many lines of code does Firefox have?
6. Click on the World Activity Map (lower right side of screen). List some of the locations of the developers:
7. Go back to the main Firefox page and click on the “Code Analysis” link under right-hand DEVELOPMENT menu.
8. What other languages is Firefox written in?
9. What language has the second highest number of lines of code?
10. Of the programming languages used in Firefox, which language is the most highly commented?
11. Click on the “Contributors” link under right-hand COMMUNITY menu.
12. How long have the top three contributors been involved in the project?
13. Click on the “Managers” link under right-hand COMMUNITY menu.
14. How many managers does the project have?

Comparison of Epiphany, Firefox and K-Meleon

1. Go back to the Ohloh main page: http://www.ohloh.net/
2. Click on the “Compare Project Metrics” link on the lower left side of the page.
3. Enter Epiphany in the first column and select Epiphany browser.
4. Once the information of Epiphany is displayed, enter Firefox in the second column.
5. Repeat using K-Meleon in the third column.
6. Which project has more developers?
7. Which project is older?
8. Which project has the largest number of developers in the past 12 months?
9. Which project has the larger number of lines of code?

Additional Information

List of other supporting material. Likely to be links to web sites.

Rights

Licensed CC BY-SA