Lab 1

The focus of this post is to compare the development process two open source projects with different licenses. More specifically, the way each community accepts code into their so beloved project.

 Atom

Built on Electron, Atom is a fully hackable text editor with focus on development and customization. It is a strong alternative to the (in)famous Sublime Text, where customization can sometimes get in the way of productivity and the free version will pop a window once in a while to offer the full version. Atom is open source and for anyone. Atom and its core packages are MIT licensed and hosted at Github.

The MIT license is the shortest and most liberal of the open source licenses. Anyone can modify it, as long as the project creator is credited, and there are no liabilities regarding the quality of the software. That means that it is really straight forward to contribute. All that is necessary is the effort to improve the project.

The project creators use Git as the version control. To contribute, the new assets must be sent by performing a pull request. The request is then reviewed according to some guidelines and after thorough review, the request is accepted into the core project. Although there is a detailed review, the process is relatively fast. Here is an example of a pull request for a bug fix, which got through to the core code after three days.

Mozilla

The giant Mozilla is the other open source project I've picked for this assignment. It is truly makes an example of open source development done well and really, it's what saved it from not existing these days (formerly Netscape).

It uses the MPL license. According to Mozilla "the MPL fills a useful space in the spectrum of free and open source software licenses, sitting between the Apache license, which does not require modifications to be shared, and the GNU family of licenses, which requires modifications to be shared under a much broader set of circumstances than the MPL."

Mozilla is a huge deal in the open source world, and so the contribution process is longer and stricter than most. That said, the people at Mozilla want your contribution, so they help by walking you through the process in a detailed manner. The patches take more steps to get through and there is a lot of feedback and support from other developers. This patch had took about 10 months to get through since its entry.