Friday, January 17, 2020

Lab 1 - Open Source Research

In my search for open source Software I decided to look into two which I have used in the past and continue to use to this day. Those being Firefox and GIMP.

Firefox being the software I'm currently using to display this page has come a long way in large part thanks to its open source community. There is a vast number of people bug hunting and bug fixing, as well as a fairly understandable code review process. The example which I looked at can be seen here:
https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D48202
This is a simple bug fix which was approved back in October of 2019, It was written by a single contributor and reviewed by a single reviewer, being either the module owner or a designated peer, before being accepted onto the main branch.

The other piece of software, an image editing tool known as GIMP also takes the open source approach. To get a contribution added to GIMP, you must like Firefox make a fork then make a merge request. This request is then viewed by a developer at GIMP for review and any tweaks that need to be made will be made as well as receiving community feedback. After the code has been finalized or approved in its current state by the developer, the code is merged.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/merge_requests/195

These two ways of merging contributions are similar but show the difference in scale of the two projects. Firefox most likely receives far more merge requests than GIMP, thus forcing them to spread out their commit privilege to the community where as GIMP can afford to only allow employees to merge.

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