User:Jpaul
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Jody Paul
Jody Paul is on the faculty of the Mathematical and Computer Sciences department at Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU Denver), an urban institution with a modified, open-admission policy.
Dr. Paul's main areas of interest include Computer Science Education, Software Engineering, and Cognitive Science.
Observations made while exploring HFOSS projects
Sugar Labs
Contributions
- The roles most applicable for my students: Content Writer, Developer, Designer, Translator
- Commonalities and differences across roles: All involve "communicate" (other than Educator); Each represents a different skill set
Tracker
- The general process for submitting a bug involves using Trac for issue tracking. A bug is reported by creating and filing a new ticket. A registered login is necessary.
- The types/categories of tickets listed include: defect, enhancement, and task. There is much information available for each ticket, such as: Reporter (author), Type, Component, Version, Keywords, Priority, Milestone, Owner, Cc list, Resolution, Status, Summary, and Description
Repository
- As of Mar 7, 2017, the date of the last commit was Feb 5, 2017, but this appears to correspond to a commit from Oct 10, 2016.
Release cycle
- Each release cycle includes "development, beta, release candidate and final releases."[1] The roadmap provides greater detail with scheduled release dates and freeze points. The most recent item on the roadmap schedule is dated 1 October 2016.
Sahana Eden
Community
- The grouping of contributors is relatively similar to that found in Sugar Labs but appears to be more focused on development than communication. The types of contributions associated with three of the groups include:
- Developers - Code level design and implementation contributions
- Testers - Both manual and automated testing; allows for non-technical contributions
- Designers - Primarily user interface design contributions
Tracker can be found here. Place your answers to the following on your wiki page.
- The Sahana Eden project, like Sugar Labs, uses Trac for issue tracking. The information contained in a report of active tickets [2] is essentially the same as in the Sugar Labs report with minor difference in which fields are shown (e.g., Sahana Eden shows "Component", "Version", and "Created" fields whereas Sugar Labs shows "Milestone") and Sahana includes a distinct "documentation" type. Sahana Eden also provides more pre-constructed reports to facilitate searching and viewing the Trac database (compare [3] with [4]).
Repository
- As of Mar 7, 2017, the date of the most recent commit was Mar 7, 2017.
Release cycle
- Sahana Eden appears to use the Milestone and Roadmap structure from Trac. The roadmap at the website [5] appears to lack updating, with Milestone 0.9 shown as "5 years late" and Milestone 1.0 as "Planned for: May 2012 (Draft)".
FOSS Field Trip
GitHub
Search for term "education" produced: "We’ve found 11,995 repository results"
First project: "vhf/free-programming-books". Graphs>Commits indicates repository commit activity, weekly and daily.
Search for term "humanitarian" produced: "We’ve found 284 repository results"
The HTBox/crisischeckin project (as of 20 March 2017) shows: "Updated on Nov 4, 2016"
Search for phrase "disaster management" produced: "We’ve found 138 repository results"
OpenHub
Search for term "education" indicated 347 pages. Page 347 has one project. Assuming all other pages have 10, there are 3461 projects.
All KDE Education code locations appear to be at "anongit.kde.org", none indicate "github.com".
10 projects are identified as being similar to KDE Education.
OpenHub provides project information such as summaries and news, as well as data about the code base, repository activity, and contributors.
Search for term "humanitarian" returned 34 projects.
Search for phrase "disaster management" returned 54 projects.
"Activity Not Available" is described begin associated with "projects that do not have recent analysis because of problems with their code locations or other problems blocking Open Hub from collecting and analyzing code". (http://blog.openhub.net/about-project-activity-icons/ accessed 20 March 2017)
The "Orgs Explore - Open Hub" page shows activity statistics arranged by organization and type of organization.
The OpenMRS Core project on OpenHub (as of 20 March 2017) shows a last commit date of "18-August-2016". It also shows "Activity Not Available" (described previously).
The OpenMRS Core project on GitHub (as of 20 March 2017) shows multiple commits on 20 March 2017.
The "Activity Not Available" indicator on OpenHub points to a disconnect between the information available to and shown on OpenHub and the project repository hosted on GitHub.
GitHub and OpenHub provide different information with some overlap. Understanding the limitations of those helps in interpreting search results at each site. SourceForge is yet another such site that may also warrant searching. Perhaps using general search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, ...) may be more beneficial for locating projects than using specific repository hosts' search features.
Project Evaluation
Walk through of an evaluation of the OpenMRS project
The table below contains entries for each of the evaluation criteria in the Project Evaluation Learning Activity. The evaluation for each criterion is recorded in the "Evaluation Data" column. A score is assigned in the level column using zero to indicate that the criterion is not met at all, two to indicate that the criterion is fully met, and 1 for something in between. The project overall total indicates the sum of scores for each of the criteria. (See: Evaluation Table Key)
Evaluation Table
| Evaluation Factor | Level (0-2) |
Evaluation Data |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing | 2 | Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0) |
| Language | 2 | Java (95.5%), SQLPL (2.9%), GAP (0.7%) |
| Level of Activity | 1 | Relatively low activity over past 12 months |
| Number of Contributors | 1 | 253 contributors are listed. Looking at the graphs, less than a handful have significant activity in the past 5 years. Looking at the pulse for the last month, however, "16 authors have pushed 84 commits to master and 116 commits to all branches.") |
| Product Size | 0 | 218.35 MB (hundreds of thousands of lines of text if 1 character = 1 byte) |
| Issue Tracker | 1 | No issues logged via GitHub Ready for Work: 0 + 10 + 87 + 351 + 251 + 83 + 471 = 1253 Closed: 1 + 323 + 1615 + 3058 + 1252 + 487 + 3112 = 9848 Low/Sporadic activity |
| New Contributor | 2 | The Developer Guide is a very useful starting point. Getting Started as a Developer is somewhat welcoming and accessible. The OpenMRS Developers Guide is rather daunting. |
| Community Norms | 2 | The OpenMRS Code of Conduct is based on the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, addresses norms of collaborative behavior, and specifies penalties associated with violations of the code. Arbitrary conversations read in OpenMRS Talk appear to adhere to the code, be relevant, and often provide links to documented information. |
| User Base | 2 | Looking at the atlas there appear to be numerous locations at which OpenMRS is or has been used. Clicking on numerous Clinical sites, however, shows the notation "Why is this site fading away?" The 2016 Annual Report states that "Based on documented reports, OpenMRS is currently in use in 1,845 locations around the world." Instructions are provided for downloading, setting up, and using the software. |
| Total Score | 13 | This provided a very useful starting point for assessing appropriateness of an HFOSS project for use in a course. Having had this experience, I can see where and how I would choose to modify the criteria and the interpretation of evaluation data to facilitate appropriate project choice. For example, using differently-scaled Levels and a weighted sum for Total Score may better reflect the variance and relative importance of the evaluation factors. |
Intro to Copyright and Licensing
1.
openMRS-core: Mozilla Public License, version 2.0
incubator-fineract: Apache License, Version 2.0
regulately-back-end: Not obvious. The regulately-front-end project indicates "The MIT License (MIT)"
2.
The MIT License requires that licensees must provide attribution and include both the copyright and the license. Licensees may modify, redistribute, and derive commercial value from the work. There is no specific requirement with respect to the licensing of derivative works or distribution of associated source code. Authors may not be held liable.
The Apache License 2.0 requires that licensees must provide attribution and include the copyright, the license, and changes made. Licensees may modify, redistribute, and derive commercial value from the work. There is no specific requirement with respect to the licensing of derivative works or distribution of associated source code. The software may be warrantied, which determines if the licensee may be held liable. Derivative works may be subject to patent claims.
The Mozilla License 2.0 requires that licensees must provide attribution and include the copyright and the license. Licensees may modify, redistribute, and derive commercial value from the work. Licensees must include the original source and must disclose source for all derivative works. The software may be warrantied, which determines if the licensee may be held liable. Derivative works may be subject to patent claims.
3.
I would be comfortable with contributing my own work to an open source project under any of these licenses. That has less to do with the specific license than it does with the project itself.
That said, I think a more pertinent issue is comfort with respect to requiring students to contribute to a project under these licenses.
I would be comfortable only with licenses that permit students to use their work for other purposes without restriction. I believe I would have issues with a license that permits others to use a student's work (a) without attribution or (b) for commercial use without their explicit permission. Given that each of the licenses identified above permits commercial use, I would not be comfortable with requiring the contribution of students in projects with such licenses.
Another concern about external project work in general is raised when participation in some specific project(s) is required as part of a course; even more so if such participation is part of a required course. The concern is whether students should have a say in determining if their own work is (a) to be made "public" and (b) to be used by others. This concern indicates potentially significant complications in course administration.
FOSS in Courses 1 (Instructors)
A target course for Fall 2017 is Software Engineering Principles, a senior-level introduction to software engineering.
1. A possible activity is for students to review the requirements (user stories, scenarios, software requirements specifications, ...) as documented within an HFOSS project. Outcomes can include identification of the types of requirements as well as assessments of the quality of specific requirements and of the collection as a whole.
2. Another possible activity is for students to review the design of an HFOSS project. Outcomes can include the identification of the architectural paradigm, the results of applying design metrics, and the identification of potential refactorings.
I would appreciate help in locating an HFOSS project that follows a Test-Driven Development paradigm.
