Reflections on Open Source in Today's World

The Open Source community is HUGE and open source related projects/ideas/news are being shared all across the web. With the Internet being so vast it is always good to have a hub to aggregate all these open source stuff into one convenient website, and that's where Opensource.com comes into play.

Opensource.com is an online publication focused on how open source is applied to different areas including business, education, government, health, law and other disciplines of life. 

Our goal is to further the open source way by sharing the open source movement. Our community of readers is made up of those who believe that open participation and sharing can tackle the business, social, environmental, and technological challenges facing us today. -About Opensource.com

What Opensource.com means by the open source way can be broken into 5 major principles:

1. Open Exchange: We can learn more from each other when information is open. A free exchange of ideas is critical to creating an environment where people are allowed to learn and use existing information toward creating new ideas.
   
2. Participation: When we are free to collaborate, we create. We can solve problems that no one person may be able to solve on their own.
   
3. Rapid Prototyping: Rapid prototypes can lead to rapid failures, but that leads to better solutions found faster. When you're free to experiment, you can look at problems in new ways and look for answers in new places. You can learn by doing.
   
4. Meritocracy: In a meritocracy, the best ideas win. In a meritocracy, everyone has access to the same information. Successful work determines which projects rise and gather effort from the community.
   
5. Community: Communities are formed around a common purpose. They bring together diverse ideas and share work. Together, a global community can create beyond the capabilities of any one individual. It multiplies effort and shares the work. Together, we can do more.

Now knowing these principles of open source, I took a look at an article I found interesting from Opensource.com:

How to teach hacking in school and open up education:

Just by looking at the title of this article I instantly wanted to read it due to the fact that I'm a big proponent of teaching Computer Science and other related areas to children in school earlier then what is currently being offered. Specifically in South Carolina's Charleston Count School District (CCSD), where I went through grade school, computer related classes are not offered in most of the schools, with the only computer related class required to be offered by the schools is keyboarding classes (which just teaches kids how to type). Luckily for me, my high school, Wando H.S., offered A.P. Computer Science (which let me skip some introductional CSCI classes at the College of Charleston) but it was only offered as an "early-bird" class, which meant it started an hour earlier then the actual school day. This deterred many students who had an interest in the course but did not want to be trying to get to school at 7:30am for a whole school year. What this article talks about is teaching hacking to highschoolers as well as in open source education. Whatever you may have heard about hackers, the truth is they do something really well: discover. Hackers are motivated, resourceful, and creative. They get deeply into how things work, to the point that they know how to take control of them and change them into something else. This lets them re-think even big ideas because they can really dig to the bottom of how things function. Now, there is the expected resistance from school administrations and parents. Mostly because people don't know what hacking really is. Many people who have been called hackers, especially by the media, or who have gotten in trouble for "hacking" were not, in fact, hackers. Most all of them were just thieves and fraudsters. When you read in the news, Teen girl hacks Facebook to harass a classmate, what you're seeing is a sensationalized headline. What a hacker reads in that headline is: Mean girl watched classmate type in her Facebook password and then logged in as her. That mean people and criminals do bad things with communications medium is not a reason to fear the medium. Hacking is a type of methodology. It's a way to do research. A hacker is a type of hands-on, experimenting scientist, although perhaps sometimes the term "mad scientist" fits better, because unlike professional scientists they dive right in, following a feeling rather than a formal hypothesis. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Many interesting things have been designed or invented by people who didn't follow standard conventions of what was known or believed to be true at the time (e.g. Georg Cantor, Nikola Tesla, Galileo, etc.).

TL;DR Teaching hacking is an important subset of Computer Science and the earlier it is taught to students the better grasp they will have on the future problems and projects they will have later on in their education as well as careers.