Background III: F/OSS Resources and Composition
The emergence of F/OSS has led to the establishment of several resources on the Web to help people find and evaluate programs. Among the most popular of these is SourceForge, the flagship site of SourceForge, Inc, a publicly traded company that hosts open source software development as well as the technology discussion site Slashdot and the technology catalog ThinkGeek. Established in 1999, the main SourceForge site recently celebrated its four billionth software download, according to Kerner (2009) and now hosts over 230,000 projects, with claims of 1.8 million downloads per day. Another helpful resource run by SourceForge is Fossfor.us, a F/OSS download portal that contains detailed reviews of F/OSS programs, screenshots of programs running, and information on related programs to help users find programs to suit their needs.
Other resources to help people understand and use F/OSS are the new online journal The International Free and Open Source Law Review and the tutorial site FLOSS Manuals. The International Free and Open Source Law Review recently released its first issue, which is available online for free under the Creative Commons license. FLOSS Manuals contains documentation on a variety of free and open source programs and coordinates the production of additional documentation. The aim is to encourage the public to see what FLOSS can offer by detailing not only what programs can do, but also what they cannot. Hyde (2009) describes writing sprints, a recent initiative of FLOSS Manuals site members and volunteers in which teams meet and draft a manual within a day.
It is unreasonable to expect students in a basic writing class or any other type of composition class to perform such herculean feats with their assignments, although many will inevitably try. Technology, by virtue of its ubiquitous presence, inevitably influences the process and product of composition, and these resources provide essential information for students and teachers who want to make sense of the development and future of F/OSS. At the basic level, students need access to word processing programs to compose and format their assignments and printers to produce physical copies; most high schools have at least some computers for this purpose, and many universities house open labs for this and other purposes. However, not every institution has the resources students need to fulfill even basic computing needs, and for those that do, what do students do when they leave the school and can no longer rely on school resources? The role of the computer in the composition classroom should be to teach students what they must know to use technology successfully in composition after they leave the classroom. Ideally, students should be able to keep up with the technology curve well after leaving the composition classroom; in other words, they should leave knowing how to fish, rather than just receiving fish. F/OSS, which features updates that are free to download and typically do not tax hardware resources as strenuously as proprietary counterparts (though this is by no means an established rule) is easier for students to keep up with. In the next two sections, I will show how F/OSS can help solve two primary problems in a composition classroom: helping students understand the visual, which is an increasingly important aspect of composition as texts become more multimodal, and helping students establish a writing discipline that will help them succeed in future classes as more writing is demanded.
Previous: Background II: The Open Source Movement Next: F/OSS and Visuals I: Image Tampering