The year is coming to an end, and although it was a year of new experiences in the FLOSS community, I have shared little about this new universe that I am still beginning to know and understand.
I have always worked with free technologies in different contexts. Not only do I use GNU / Linux since my college days, but after having graduated, I worked sometimes using free technologies to create service solutions, sometimes directly developing a free software project. So when I decided to do a master’s degree, nothing more expected than opting for the FLOSS universe for my research. And so, in 2018, I started my master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of São Paulo. Initially, I had a somewhat ambitious idea (it was the feedback I received from my qualifying board) of capturing the diversity of development models which coexisting in the FLOSS universe. But time is short, and other desires have emerged. I focused my research on the Linux kernel project because of its relevance to the FLOSS phenomenon. I also have a personal interest in being capable of contributing to this project (as a good software developer).
In this journey, a FLOSS development group emerged at the university, FLUSP (FLOSS @ USP). This group, currently consolidated, helped me get involved in the Linux kernel community… modest but great learning steps. In particular, I directly thank Rodrigo Siqueira. He not only helped me technically (and with his FLUSP tutorials) but is always available to answer questions, to teach anything, and also remind me the life’s priorities. :) Besides, when he was in São Paulo, he created a scoreboard in our lab at CCSL to keep the whole lab colleagues motivated to contribute to open source projects (no matter what we chose). After he set out on new achievements in Canadian lands, I no longer heard about this scoreboard.
Contributions in a scoreboard may no longer exist, but in the next few posts, I want to talk a little bit about my Linux contribution journey with some patches for the IIO subsystem.
Here we go!