Pune/COEP/FOSS Devel Elective

College of Engineering Pune is offering a FOSS Development elective for final year IT (Information Technology) and CE (Computer Engineering) students. Praveen Arimbrathodiyil and Prof. Abhijit A.M. will be delivering guest lectures during this semester long course. Professor Abhijit AM is coordinating the course from COEP. Lectures are starting from 6th January 2011 morning. The curriculum for this course is available at Curriculum.

Our aim is to help students be part of the FOSS developers community. We are looking for some mentors to help the students. Even though two of us are taking the course, to make the course successful we need participation from the whole FOSS community. We will be using this list to assign mentors. So please add your name and areas you can guide students on that list. The idea is to have one mentor per student through out the course and help him or her to be part of a project community.

Also if you can take any sessions on any of the topics mentioned there, mention your interest on the talk page. We can consider remote sessions over irc or video conferencing too.

Next Steps

• Mentor list
• Updates (Mailing List)
• Session signups

Course Outline

Jan 08-14

Make, git, cscope, code browsing tips, compiling source code(gnash) Work:

• compile your own software: gnash, compile kde svn version - trunk, compile gnome (long term)
• Get a mentor
• Join mailing list, join SMS list
• sign up on fosscommunity.in wiki and add details to your user page
• Create a makefile for hyphenation (shravan knows)
• setup your own debian-testing virtualbox image.

Weekday: Revolution OS film (Try thursday evening) (postponed)

Jan 15-21

Debian Packaging - demo of packaging, bug tracking, analysis of the process and learning terms like upstream, downstream, maintener, developer, contributor, etc. Work:

• Read new debian maintainer guide
• Find the software that you will package for debian and another that you will maintain upstream (through the mentor).
• Package the selected software for debian.
• Setup and learn configuration of mediawiki

Weekday: Freeing the mind, end of proprietary culture - Video of Eben Moglen and discussion

Jan 22-28 (Zest from 22nd)

Discussion and work:

• carry on Debian packaging.
• IRC session with Karthik (Debian Developer) and Vasudev Kamath

(There may be a lecture on 28th itself)

Jan 29 - Feb 4

Talk: Discussion on licensing issues (Try to do it on 28th) Weekday: Freedom in the cloud - Interview of Eben Moglen and Discussion, Discussion on Diaspora project

Work: Talk: Business Models using FOSS Technical capabilty strengthening work. To be done in groups of 2-4 each.

• Kerberos + NFSv4 setup
• Samba authentication
• Iptables + network connection sharing
• Managing data: Encrypted volumes, LVM, software RAID
• Communication security: GPG, SSL, Certificates, key signing party

Feb 5 - Feb 11

Talk: Each person to present their progress report on packaging and upstream maintainance Work: continue technical capability strengthening.

Feb 12-18

Talk: Each team to present technical capability strengthening work. Work

Feb 19 - 25 (Midsem from 18-25th)

Talk: Best practices in communication, Processes like do-acracy. Shakti Kannan may be invited. Work:

• Continue package improvements
• Integrating your work with debian

Feb 26 - Mar 4

Talk: Case studies - Firefox, silpa, smc. Work: Do your own case study. The instructor will assign you one project each.

Mar 5 - Mar 11

Mar 12 - 18 (Gathering 9-13th March) Redhat volunteer: Fedora Packaging. Work:

Apr 9 - 15 (Apr 15 last date of instructions)

• Package any one fedora package.

Material

We will maintain a common note for all the sessions (everyone is encouraged to maintain their own notes as well). It would serve as a platform for community to engage us and build great course material for everyone else to follow.

Some notes from the first session (Saturday 8th January 2011, 1000-1230, COEP FOSS Lab)

foss_lect_8_1_11.txt

foss_lect_15_1_11

revolution_os_screening_29_1_11

foss_lec_3_2_11.txt

Notes on using Doxygen which is very good and effective code browsing tool.

Configuring and Using Doxygen

GNU Project History

Patents and Free softwares

Making money out of Free Software

List of Case study items and volunteer list

List of suggested software for reading and modifying code

FOSS Students Final Year Projects