Open Source in Capstone Course

Computer science faculty members and students continue to contribute to open source projects. A long series of open source experiences have involved students, starting in the previous century with the Mozilla Calendar project under the direction of Dr. Paul Buhler. Since then, three additional open source projects have links to computer science at the College of Charleston include CIRDLES, under the direction of Dr. Jim Bowring, Blobber, led by Brian Muller with involvement of Dr. Semmy Purewal and many others in CSCLUG.org, CLforJava, under the direction of Prof. Jerry Boetje and some new Pecha Kucha social software by Semmy Purewal and Clay McCauley (soon to be released). All but the Mozilla project originated at the College or have roots here through one or more developers.

Do students appreciate the value  of working on a relatively large, multi-year software project that involves a sizable code base, version control, bug reporting, coder reading, teamwork, and a suite of other software engineering tools and processes? Is the open source experience contributing a valued learning experience for undergraduates in Computer Science at the CofC? 

Note: March 2009 is CLforJava month, in celebration of the contributions of more than 150 CofC, computer science majors to the implementation of Common List in Java. Prof. Boetje plans to release CLforJava at the 2009 International LISP Conference under an open source license.

(cons ‘This (cons ‘is (cons ‘the (50th anniversary of LISP))))

-Chris Starr