A pioneer initiative at the University of São Paulo, the undergraduate course on Open Source Systems (SSC0953), was created in 2019 to meet the interest of the growing local FOSS community fostered by the activities of CCOS.
The course, offered by the Department of Computer Systems at ICMC, has been regularly thought by Prof. Francisco J. Monaco to students from the undergraduate programs in Computer Sciences, Computer Engineering and Information Systems. Together, more than one hundred students take the course yearly.
The course
The course covers several relevant aspects of FOSS development, including
conceptual foundations: the FOSS paradigm, historical evolution, state of art and case studies; methodologies and tools: open and distributed development tools and resources, version control systems, build automation, release and distribution policies; project management: requirements for open collaborative development, formation of development communities, contributions management, human factors; legal issues: essential notions on intellectual property, author rights, technology licensing, ethical, legal and economical requirements and implications in the selection of distribution licenses; business models: FOSS as innovation strategy, financial and business models, commercial projects and entrepreneurship.
During the course, students are requested both to make a contribution to one major popular FOSS project and to work in a hackathon-like project developed by the whole class in the course of the six-moth term.
During these activities, students have the opportunity to dive deep into state-of-practice FOSS methodologies and tools such as Git, branching strategies, issue tracking, contribution workflows etc. It is a hands-on experience in which newcomers and future professionals interact with the worldwide FOSS community and acquaint themselves with the challenges of starting and maintaining a FOSS project.
For further information on the course, please visit the official page.