WHAT IS OPEN-SOURCE ?

 

The term open source refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible.

The term originated in the context of software development to designate a specific approach to creating computer programs. Today, however, “open source” designates a broader set of values — what we call “the open source way.” Open source projects, products, or initiatives embrace and celebrate principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development.

WHY DO PEOPLE PREFER USING OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE ?

People prefer open source software to proprietary software for a number of reasons, including:

Control. Many people prefer open source software because they have more control over that kind of software. They can examine the code to make sure it’s not doing anything they don’t want it to do, and they can change parts of it they don’t like. Users who aren’t programmers also benefit from open source software, because they can use this software for any purpose they wish — not merely the way someone else thinks they should.

Training. Other people like open source software because it helps them become better programmers. Because open source code is publicly accessible, students can easily study it as they learn to make better software. Students can also share their work with others, inviting comment and critique, as they develop their skills. When people discover mistakes in programs’ source code, they can share those mistakes with others to help them avoid making those same mistakes themselves.

Security. Some people prefer open source software because they consider it more secure and stable than proprietary software. Because anyone can view and modify open source software, someone might spot and correct errors or omissions that a program’s original authors might have missed. And because so many programmers can work on a piece of open source software without asking for permission from original authors, they can fix, update, and upgrade open source software more quickly than they can proprietary software.

Stability. Many users prefer open source software to proprietary software for important, long-term projects. Because programmers publicly distribute the source code for open source software, users relying on that software for critical tasks can be sure their tools won’t disappear or fall into disrepair if their original creators stop working on them. Additionally, open source software tends to both incorporate and operate according to open standards.

Community. Open source software often inspires a community of users and developers to form around it. That’s not unique to open source; many popular applications are the subject of meetups and user groups. But in the case of open source, the community isn’t just a fanbase that buys in (emotionally or financially) to an elite user group; it’s the people who produce, test, use, promote, and ultimately affect the software they love.

WHAT IS MESHERY ?

Meshery is a multi-service mesh management plane that offers lifecycle, configuration, and performance management of service meshes and applications running on top of those meshes.

Meshery uses a common service mesh performance specification to describe and capture performance benchmarks and results. The spec contains general information about the performance test (e.g. start/end times), service mesh and proxy build numbers, Kubernetes cluster details (nodes, type of nodes, memory information), and the actual results.

One of the ideas behind Meshery is to be a vendor and project-neutral tool that can benchmark the performance of different service meshes. So, if you ever wondered which service mesh performs better — Meshery can answer those questions for you.

LEE CALCOTE (MAINTAINER OF THE PROJECT)

Lee Calcote is an innovative product and technology leader, passionate about developer platforms and management software for clouds, containers, functions, and applications. Advanced and emerging technologies have been a consistent focus through Calcote’s tenure at SolarWinds, Seagate, Cisco, and Pelco. An advisor, author, and speaker, he is active in the tech community as a Docker Captain and Cloud Native Ambassador.

MY OPEN SOURCE JOURNEY

It all started 9 months back with the below LinkedIn post, posted by one of my awesome senior who is currently interning at RedHat.

Then I had a conversation with 2 of my amazing seniors one Subham Kumar Rai (mentioned above) and Anand Kumar Singh. They told me many things related to the project and how should I approach more participation in the open-source community and some general advice. And the conversation with 2 of them was worth it!

And from there onwards there was no looking back, I was warmly welcomed by Lee Calcote sir, and other community members by joining the slack channel for further communications. Lee sir provided me with some resources to delve more into the project and also assigned some good-first-issues for solving. And after going through the resources and setting up my development environment I was all set to contribute.

And, after all these things are done properly I started contributing actively in the project, attending development as well as community meeting regularly.

So, this is how my journey in contributing to open source project started, and till now I have contributed in 3 open-source organizations one of them is LAYER5 (of which I am an active contributor), FOSSASIA and GATSBY. Also, I have participated in many open-source contests such as Hacktoberfest, DevopsCember, Kharagpur Winter Of Code (KWOC), NJACK Winter Of Code (NWOC), Girlscript Summer Of Code (GSSOC).

LAYER5 AND UEM JAIPUR ACADEMIC PARTNERSHIP

Since 5 of us from our college were regularly participating in the meeting as well as the community (Anand Bhaiya, Subham Bhaiya, Nikhil Bhaiya, Me, Gunjan) so Lee sir thought that more students from our college can also participate in the community to learn more about this emerging technology which will definitely help the students to be future-ready as well as equipped with the current market trends.
So overall it will help the students to grow as an individual and at the same time, our open source community will also grow. So, with these concepts proper discussion was done between Lee sir and UEM Jaipur faculty Rupayan Das sir and after that an academic partnership was established between the 2 organizations.

Ashis Singh,
Student, Department of Computer Science & Engineering,
University of Engineering & Management (UEM), Jaipur