First thoughts about Open Source

by Guillermo Montecinos, Open Source Studio, NYU ITP Fall 2018

My experience with open source seems to be pretty short: a few months ago I thought that just publishing my code in a repo was open source. Far from that -as can be extracted from Kagan's and Harihareswara's texts- OS is mostly a community of people with similar interests that work -in different ways- for a common goal. Considering that, what I believed as open source clearly was just a taste of it, but not OS at all.

As a newbie, I think it's pretty important to take into account Hanselman's post considerations: first impressions of new collaborators affects the decision of committing a second collaboration. That's what happen when you join any new human group, if you are bullied when you introduce yourself, or you just feel not welcomed, you will probably re-consider assisting again. In OS -I perceive- people feel safe to be rude because they are protected by the anonymity of being behind their laptop. Some coders use to be violent, maybe because some of them have a stronger knowledge and sometimes just because they are male and macho. But I think this is not a isolated problem of coder community nor open source, it's a sociological problem that has always existed but with the new mediums has spread extremely fast. Twitter is an example: it was originally thought as a discussion space, and nowadays is a dirty guerrilla were people are just trolling and insulting to other who think different.