[FOSSRIT] Re: Fwd: 7th Annual Election Night Hackathon & Facebook FOSS Talk
FOSS@RIT hackathons encourage FOSS licensing. Often, as when we are local sites for
larger events like Space Apps, they mandate Open Licenses. As this event, and our Spring
one, we will focus on civic and humanitarian hacking, spaces in which FOSS licenses are
generally expected, especially since many will be working on existing open projects.
SJ
On Oct 16, 2017, at 3:56 PM, Justin W. Flory
<jflory7(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/16/2017 03:21 PM, David E. Narvaez wrote:
> Many hackathons are sponsored or hosted by schools, which is an additional
> reason they should adopt this rule. Free software is a contribution to public
> knowledge, while nonfree software withholds knowledge from the public. Thus,
> free software supports the spirit of education, while proprietary software
> opposes it. Schools should insist that all their software development be free
> software, including that of hackathons they support."
>
Hi David! Thanks for your comments here. :)
For all six previous years of this events, students are encouraged to
open source their projects and collaborate with others at the event.
There's also usually "open source gurus" around the event to help answer
questions and introduce open source licensing for people that have
questions.
However, forcing students to open source any of their projects they make
also doesn't feel like the right way either. Maintaining freedom of
choice for students to decide how they want to share (or not share)
their projects is at their own liberty. And I think it's better to
introduce students to the benefits of open sourcing their code and help
them understand why, then telling them that to participate in the event,
their code must be released open source. It doesn't feel like the truly
"free" thing from my point of view (this is also a personal viewpoint as
a student too, and I don't represent the organizers or MAGIC with that).
--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com
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