Moenika Chowdhury: Open Source Response

[moenika]

Through open source software and code the community of scientists and creators becomes collaborative, and through that new software and innovations are more attainable. Open source software has the ability to solve issues programmers might be facing, not through plagiarism but through collaborative problem solving. In “Open Source as a Culture”, it is stated that “the art of creation is a social act”, which I agree with. Adding a social aspect to coding allows programmers to apply their learnings and thoughts in different communities, facilitating growth in all sectors. There are many benefits that out-weigh the negatives, for example education and a sense of community. As a computer science learner I tend to “get stuck” in my code, thinking the same way over and over again not getting anywhere. Here is when I go to examples of open source code to give me ideas on how to solve my issue, and it gives me a new way to think.

The fact that the this is a controversial issue is due to people misusing what “open source” actually means, since working in a community has usually been the norm. What is defined as your creation? Here is where the topic of copyright comes in. Since code is functional there is a challenging intellectual-property track. This issue delves into the question of how do we innovate and improve without exploiting other people’s inventions? Code is interesting since there are hundreds of ways to solve problems and issues; this is where personal growth comes from. One can improve a program’s running time through tweaks in the algorithmic structure, but without the discovery of that algorithm it could never be improved. Hence why collaboration is so important; we learn from our past and mistakes. If code and art were locked into a room in fear that they would be plagiarized, many programmers and artists would be lacking inspiration and improvement in their respective fields.