Last Updated on by ansarulhaq
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Why ICT Student Should Use Open Source Software?
- Categories of Open Source Sofware
- Benefits of Open Source in Education
- Top Open Source Software for the ICT Students
- How to Contribute to Open Source?
- Conclusion
Introduction
Open Source Software (OSS) is the community-based software build with collaboration of hundreds of developer across the world. Over 90% of the companies uses open source software as a component of their proprietary software.
Ever realized how few important software can only be accessed after subscribing to them?. And you feel like, why should I pay for this when it feels like it should be free?. That is where with the universal purpose of right to free software, open source community comes in. Free software that can benefit student in education.
OOS source code is usually made publicly accessible on Github under a license that allows anyone on internet to use, study, modify, and distribute the software.
Till date there are millions of OSS build, each with its own use. But you as an ICT Student doesn’t have to know or use all OSS. There are few selective OSS that every ICT students should know.
Why ICT Student Should Use Open Source Software?
Open Source Software is the part of ICT. It emerges from this field while aim to help whole world. Who better than ICT students should know this? yes, OSS should be a part of ICT student. Other few reasons that ICT students should use OSS are:-
- It is free.
- Source code is publicly available, you can check codes anytime, anywhere you want.
- And If you love something in software, you can enhance it yourself.
- If you need something else into the software, you can contribute yourself.
- ICT students who contribute to open source are much more likely to get job quickly in their career. Even with more salaries.
- You will start to feel like God, I mean in a sense of being a creator. A creator of a piece of software.
Categories of Open Source Software
Productivity and Office
LibreOffice is an alternative to Microsoft Office. It provides tools for word processing, spreadsheet, presentation. It has all required features and it’s free. It supports a wide range of document types and good to go software in cross platforms.
It is the note taking app, wait but it is not just note taking app. It supports multiple media type. The best feature of joplin is that, it allows us to share the notes and collaboration. We can also publish our note on internet and share url with others. I like it because it also supports markdown text editing via plugin.
Coding and Development
VS Code is Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rich with writing code of any format. It has the bunch of extension that helps developer to achieve almost anything they want to. It is very friendly, you can edit almost any shortcut in keyboard. It is favorite of almost all of the developers across the world. We can tile multiple files and parallelly write codes. It is just such an amazing tool you would ever see. VS Code also supports live collaboration with extensions like Live Share, allowing multiple students to code together in real-time.
Git is a distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. It is easy to learn. It keeps track of the version of the projects you create. It runs locally and needs us to download git. It is super amazing to track changes in a code and create branches to work on different features of your app. It really removes all the burden of keeping the copy of your working code. It has three major steps.
- git init
- git add .
- git commit -m “<message>”
Almost every developer uses this tool unknowingly. It is the same tool that allows us to debug c and c++ code in any IDE. It works behind the scene when we click in “compile” or “compile and run”. It is simply great tool that let us know the mistakes we made in our code. And what else could be better tool which helps us create our mistake.
Design and Creative
It is image editor tool which is rich in plugins. It runs on all os (Windows, MacOS, Linux and others). It has great color management features which makes it outstand from other image editing tool. It keeps adding features and gets better everyday. And who won’t want their photo look great. Isn’t it?
It is figma alternative. It allows us to design beautiful website. It has almost all the features provided by such tools. The transition of design to development is smooth using this design tool. The design thus created provides us with code that will work to generate the same design on website.
WordPress the drag and drop functional website generator. It breaks the traditional coding expertise required to build an website. WordPress proves that anyone even without coding skills can generate beautiful websites. It has rich templates of the website design. The wordpress community is so much helpful and large. It hosts many programs that helps students across the world grow.
It is 3d motion graphics designing tool. It is favorite of every designer, animation artist and developer in general. It allows us to generate the 3d objects in ease. It is user friendly. It can be taken as an example of beautiful thing generated when many talents come together.
Video and Audio
It is audio mixing tool. You can create audio. Put some music. Change the voice. Do whatever you want to with your voice. And show it to world by exporting. It supports all frequency of sounds. It is interactive and user friendly. Contains all know feature on manipulating audio. Whenever you hear an audio, Audacity comes in mind once you start using it.
Education and Brainstorming
It is the brainstorming tool to design the wire frame. It provides us with whiteboard. We can you pen tools. Drag texts, images and videos. It has eraser and wide variety of color selection. It is user friendly. It allows us to draw basic shapes to advanced vector option. It can be used to design ux of the website and wireframe easily.
It is the flashcard tool. It looks simple yet very powerful. It has all possible features that a flashcard could have. It is very powerful tool for smart learning method. It allows us to active recall. Mostly useful for visual learner.
Benefits of Open Source in Education
First thing open source makes sure about is the privacy and transparency. You can exactly know, where you data is being stored if any. The code are publicly available so it is transparent. The following are the major benefits of open source in education:-
- OSS are build with collaboration of many developers. It has accessibility feature the support the specially able students.
- Educators use it to teach students about various concepts in software.
- Free certificates and real experience.
It is free. one don’t have to pay to use the tool just for the sake of learning. It favors student to save their money.
Top Open Source Software for the ICT Students
Other than these OSS, there are other few software that are worth knowing,
you can figure out which tools are useful to you and which are not. But yeah, It is always good to use Open Source Software.
How to Contribute to Open Source
Jump to the github repository of the open source project. Follow their guidelines on how to contribute. The general guideline follows the following:-
- Fork the repository
- Clone your repository
- Create branch and make changes
- Push it to your repository
- Make pull request
After pull request the code reviewer/maintainer will review the changes and if it seems to be useful then it will be merged to the original repository. Detained guide on contributing to open source is available here Open Source Guide
Conclusions
People around the world are highly dependent on the Open Source Software. It fuels million of people. ICT students cannot imagine being themselves without Open Source Tools like Linux, Git, Postgres SQL, Wireshark, Redis etc. They just feel like a part of daily life. Only if OSS wouldn’t existed, Things would have been different for all of us. World could have felt so expensive to live. So lonely to live. Thanks to millions of developer, Putting their energy on something that helps millions of other like them, us.
By mastering these platforms, students can gain industry level experience with saving cost. Open Source encourages colaboration, innovation, and problem solving. Those who starts the open source projects has an great story of their start and in similar way, you can solve problem that you are facing now. so that others doesn’t have to go through what you have been through.
If you’re an ICT student looking for software every student should know, start with the open source tools listed here. Explore, contribute, and grow with the community. In doing so you will become part of global movement shaping the future of technology.
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