When I think of open source, the first things that pop in my head are Discord and community guidelines. This is mainly because any open source projects I’ve come across are very transparent about communication in order to improve the project, as well as focusing on growing their community. Often times, their guidelines are mentioned in the home page for new users including a public discord invite. The main advantage of open source would have to be extensive documentation; since the community is forever growing, its important to make sure anyone who is just joining can follow the flow of changes made without issue. One of disadvantages in comparison to closed source projects would have to be the response time sometimes. Just because a community is big doesn’t guarantee that requests will be met quickly, and sometimes there is an overload (too many cooks in the kitchen). I decided to register for this course because the idea of working more on open source projects interested me, and it seemed like a great way to force myself to socialize and practice working in tandem on a project.

The most common open source projects I use these days include:

Hot-And-Cold - A reddit game that has to do with word association. It is a running joke that all users have a love hate relationship with it as word rankings sometimes don’t make sense (like how is the word carrot but then bunny is ranked 1000 and tomato is ranked 650???) I just found out it is OSS so the devs do accept further help and it has me curious as to how the word rankings are determined.

GIMP - When i first got into editing as a kid and I didn’t have photoshop money, GIMP was the only application that had extensive tutorials on it that I could use. Though I don’t use it as much now, I recently found out that it has been FOSS this entire time.

Exercism - It’s an open source coding website for coding practice in 100+ languages. I sometimes use it when I am bored, or when I want to practice a new language I just came across. They provide documentation and are very transparent about how anyone can contribute.

p5.js - An open source software that is great for using javascript and learning for websites and the sort. I’ve used it in high school and IDM courses.