This is my another blog post and a part of my GCI task.
Lets begin with open source. So what is it? Such softwares have their source code freely available , i.e, people can modify it and redistribute it. Lets go in further deatils about open source. You may be wondering what advantage it has… it can be better quality software and more secure and less prone to bugs than proprietary systems, because it has so many users poring over it and weeding out problems. Learn More about open source here and here
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner. According to scientists who studied it, open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration.
The open-source software development, or collaborative development from multiple independent sources, generates an increasingly more diverse scope of design perspective than any one company is capable of developing and sustaining long term. A 2008 report by the Standish Group states that adoption of open-source software models has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers.
So now you know what an open source organisation is. And one such organisation is – FOSSASIA.Lets get in detail about Fossasia.
Fossasia is a network of people from all continents, who want to see progress and improvements of people’s lives in Asia and everywhere. They are developers, designers, event organizers and contributors who want to learn and share ideas, create and make digital software tools and hardware, that benefits people around the world.
FOSSASIA is a non-profit organization supporting developers and makers of Free and Open Source technologies. It was founded by Hong Phuc Dang and Mario Behling 5n 2009 . The aim of FOSSASIA is to develop and adapt open technologies for social change with a focus on Asian users. The FOSSASIA Summit takes place annually one month after the Lunar New Year. Projects at FOSSASIA range from open hardware, to design, graphics and software. FOSSASIA offers resources to projects and organizes an annual Open Technology event for students, developers and start ups.
The FOSSASIA Summit is the top Free and Open Source technology event in Asia for developers, start-ups, and contributors. It is a unique opportunity to share knowledge and experience about open source technologies and meet interesting contributors. FOSSASIA was established in the year 2009. Previous events took place in Cambodia and Vietnam.
FOSSASIA has its headquarters in Singapore, in the NUS Plug-In@Blk71 building.
More Information on Fossasia can be found on its webpage here.
I love participating with Fossasia in GCI-16. Here we work together and form something useful. We all are working on the GCI-16 website. Contributions from the students is helping in developing the site. I love the projects which allows me to learn new things however small it is. I have a passion to learn new things and so such projects are awesome for me.
Working with FOSSASIA is awesome. The tasks are very interesting to do. And working on such tasks really help me(and others) new things of which they have never heard. The very good example is Git. If I hadn’t worked here , I wouldn’t have even heard of it. Git itself teaches us a lot of things. Commiting , squashing , creating pull request , merge conflicts , etc are things which I have learned here. I have also started learning Jekyll. Building a website together is also a great experience . Here we find the issues and bugs which are there on the website and the students fix it up. We all take up different jobs for the website and when we join it together , it forms a great result , i.e , an awesome website. Last GCI when I was not much familiar with GCI , I learnt creating a blog on hugo and hosting on github pages. That was a very nice experience. For my every task with FOSSASIA , be it GCI16 or 15 , I was provided awesome help by the mentors who explain us everything step by step. When I had ZERO knowledge of Github and git they still helped me and thus I wasn’t discouraged. Had it been someone else , they would have already given up to teach me.
There are a lot of tasks in GCI but I like the ones from FOSSASIA. The main reason is the tasks which they have are of my interests. I was person who never knew what git was but I still chose that task and now I am well familiar with Git. I enjoyed learning Hugo too. Currently I am learning Jekyll and also enjoy writing here(thats why I took this task )Now I enjoy working on open source software. I believe that “LEARNING NEVER ENDS” and so I all those things which can teach me new things. Since every new thing brings some struggle ,I do not fear and get discouraged from that. If I get stuck somewhere , then I do not get a peace mind until I solve it.
Hope you enjoyed reading the post! Some parts of the post have been taken from Wikipedia.
Google Code-In 2017 