Bio of a FOSS Person (Activity)
| Title | Bio of a FOSS Person |
| Overview | Student will research an individual who has had significant influence on the FOSS movement and prepare a short biography. |
| Prerequisite Knowledge | A general introduction to the FOSS movement would be helpful. |
| Learning Objectives | Students should be able to explain how their individual contributed to the FOSS movement and why their contributions were significant. |
Background:
This activity demonstrates that licensing information for a given piece of software can be found in a number of different places and gives students the experience of finding the license information for several actual projects/products. This is important because students need to know the license for any piece of code that they are working with *and* there is no *rule* saying where a license must be put (although there are some conventions that are followed).
Before attempting this activity, students need to understand the basic
- legal framework for open source and
- types of open source licenses.
For a more in-depth look at whether licenses are contracts or "bare licenses" from a legal perspective, see [ http://rosenlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/Taxonomy-of-Licenses.pdf Chapter 4, Rosen Law Open Source Licensing Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law]
Directions:
THE INDIVIDUALISM OF OPEN SOURCE
The Unsung Heroes of Open Source
Deliverables:
Students should turn in their findings -- I've provided an example format here.
| Software | License | Where Found (URL or other location) |
| Apache OpenOffice 4 | Apache License, Version 2.0, January 2004 | Under the "Open Office" menu, I chose "About Open Office". That dialog had a License button, which is where I found the full text of the license. |
Assessment:
Students can be graded on the completeness and correctness of the responses provided in the assigned work they turn in, as well as participation in the resulting discussion, should you choose to have one.
Comments:
- The interesting thing to me about this activity is that there is no single, legal "required" location for the license information, nor any text that it must include. This can make it challenging to find the license info for a project (but doesn't reduce the importance of doing so!).
- If you are working with an open source project, you should first locate the license for that project and use it as a jumping off point.
Additional Information:
| Knowledge Area/Knowledge Unit | Social Issues and Professional Practice (SP) / Intellectual Property |
| Topic | Intellectual property rights |
| Level of Difficulty | Medium |
| Estimated Time to Completion | Each license should take ~10-15 minutes to find, so the length of the activity can be changed based on the amount of time available. |
| Materials/Environment | Internet access, editor or other tool for examining code |
| Author | Gina Likins |
| Source | n/a |
| License | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License |
Suggestions for the Open Source Project:
It would be great if your project had information explaining why the project is licensed the way it is. If that information is available and you're willing to discuss it with students, that would make a really interesting (short) Skype or IRC chat.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
