Using Open Source Software in Computer Science Courses

Open source software (OSS) has become mainstream in recent years, making a wide variety of software tools available to instructors and students. In particular, a large collection of OSS source code is now available for use in college courses in disciplines that involve software development. Concomitantly, computer science (CS) educators have been exploring different ways to reinvigorate the CS curriculum to make it more attractive, amenable, and applicable to college students. We regard appropriate OSS use to represent a major prong of a multi-pronged approach to a revamped CS curriculum. Due to our use of OSS in advanced CS courses, our students have gained useful insights into software design and development. They have also felt empowered as they worked on real-world team projects that do not necessarily end with the academic term. This paper uses a database system implementation course to illustrate our approach to OSS and provides an initial assessment

Introduction (1 Page)

In recent years, systems based on Open Source Software (OSS) have become commonplace, impacting every internet user who searches on Google, shops at Amazon.com, or trades on eBay [1]. OSS has resulted in the successful development of a wide variety of software tools, from large general-purpose operating systems to small custom pieces of software [2]. Successful examples of OSS include the Linux operating system; web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox; the Apache web server; several database systems; programming development environments such as Eclipse; and productivity suites such as OpenOffice.org.