RITLUG’s week 12 meeting on Friday April 13th at 4:30, had an Open Source 101 talk given by RITLUG’s President Justin Flory. The talk was the basics of what open source was. It was quick overview of HFOSS itself for the most part. He went through the four Rs and the differences between free and freedom. He touched lightly on the open hardware and maker movements that are a part of the open source world. He also went through the tools used by the open source community, covering both git and GitHub as well as the difference between the two (one is version control and the other is a source forge that uses git). He went through how to contribute to open source from using and identifying issues and making a fork and a pull request. Flory also talked about looking for on-boarding materials and looking for a welcoming community. He talked about the importance of having people who wear different hats. Open source communities need designers and organizers not just programmers.

It was nice to attend this talk because it showed in part how far I had come from the beginning of the semester. It also helps to attend these talks to make it easier to explain open source to others, as I often wind up doing so. Knowing the words and explanations that others use gives me more tools for explaining open source. I hung out for a bit and talked to the guys about some e-board elections related things and some TigerOS stuff.