What Open Souce means for me ...

Andrew Smith has written a good post in the opensource@seneca planet, which has made me rethink on some floating ideas in my mind ...

It is a privilege and a great opportunity that Seneca and Mozilla have met each other and is allowing some "rock star" students (like Andrew Smith and Ben Hearshum) to shine and others to be created. We get prepared before we enter the workforce and we are forced to work in projects which are in the leading edge.
Before we get graduated, we get in touch with incredible software developers from which we can learn their techniques and ways of developing. Most of this world's software developers do not have this opportunity and being prepared before graduating is a big asset. I have few friend's from when I went to University of Malaga (where I was studying Computer Engineering) who are jealous of this course that I have taken.

During this semester I have been studying everyone I have seen and have read the blogs of rhelmer, bhearshum, shaver, pike(Axel) and others..., and tried to learn the way each one of them work and what is their part on this big project.

I have also tried to learn how these people around the globe try to manage/drive/organize different sub-communities of the Mozilla communities. People like Axel and Mic Berman have to organize a HUGE variety of different communities from different countries (since they are part of the l10n drivers) and they even have time for people like me asking silly/innocent questions and knowing that in their part of the community there is so many people that just want to get only their localization out and that's it!

It has also pushed me to move from being an "only Windows developer" to "give me any other OS and I can still develop" developer.
It has also pushed to read, read and read even more (blogs, newsgroups, mailing lists, documentation, source code, etc...) and never give up against impediments!

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The first part of this post was a "thank you" letter but I would like to get back to the initial post of Andrew Smith.

The relationship of Mozilla and Seneca creates an environment of young developers to have sympathy to Mozilla because they opened their arms to helps us become more experienced developers and braver, and this is a good way of Mozilla to be able to find some gems and get some shelved project to get resumed ... For Seneca, it is a good way to be in the spot and students to earn experience before graduating and be exposed...

The problem to this environment is that it doesn't work without students who get enrolled in college. As Andrew mentioned the number of developers in the world for Open Source are not enough and the amount of Computer Science students enrollment has been continuously dropping year by year in North America and this could affect Mozilla@Seneca if it is not already affecting it.
This could lead to reducing requirements and accepting the developers that you find (this does not just affect Open Source Software Development only) rather than the developers that are prepared.

I believe that taking the Opens Source course does NOT automatically make you "prepared" but if you are lucky it can "awaken" you as a developer as I have seen in others that took the same course with me

Thanks for reading so far since I know that the flowing of my writing on English could be a little difficult ;)