Open Source as an Approach

Remembering the old and considering the modern days where the Fields were sown with seeds by the farmers and the the outcome becomes, Food as a product, essential for survival. The techniques involved in the procedure can be used as a reference to understand open source. Where the efforts and contribution are not a farmer's sole responsibility but different people and factors contribute to the product even the almighty GOD himself. You could be thinking that what I am trying to make you understand by referencing the agricultural techniques to the technique like git but as I told it is a reference to understand. The fields get initialized, added with seeds, with the commitment of a farmer and pushed by his different approaches but the destination is same for every farmer that the end product should be a product, that society can use. But the journey doesn't stop here, the product gets pushed to an environment where others collaborate with the farmer, fork it, work on it, to improve it and leaves a farmer with commits which can be remembered as an contribution by the entire society whomsoever will be benefitted by the product and this is git and github in general.

I would like to beg my pardon for creating an imaginative referencing introduction like the one above but in a sense I found no other way better in order to introduce this article and to update you about an interactive, fun and socially impactful opportunity which you will get to know about in this article later on.

Firstly let us clear our minds about git and github which creates a major misunderstanding and that simple thing is git is a version control technique to keep track of your projects while you are working on it and provides you with ability to perform checks and restore if necessary which are a necessity when you are working on a large or collaborative project on the other hand the Github is a platform currently owned by Microsoft to provide the world with a common platform for hosting their projects, where they can be accessed if public by the entire world and they can work on it using git operations and as Github says "Where the world makes software".

Github teaches you many good skills to practise while working on a project and lets you hold some good developer practises and good git practises. Like you get to learn while raising issues which can be answered by any person with your relevant skills. You can shape the project according to your own and contribute according to yourself which can be modified and reviewed by others and together will be building something which could be called a product.

Now the biggest point is how to contribute to open source, where there are many open source projects on github, you can choose something to contribute which matches your personal skillset, fork the project to your profile, work on it and and create pull request so that your work can contribute to the project and help in building something.

Coming back to the point why I referenced a farmer's hustle in an article where I am trying to explain Git and Github. Recently I came to know about an opportunity started by the students of Bundelkhand University where they are actually trying to build an app named Rak_sh_ak for the farmers which was a SIH problem statement but didn't got selected. Now as the cause was social and impactful they started to build the app via open source contributions. Regarding the project the project itself covers many techniques that cannot be developed by a single person. This project contains MERN stack section for the backend, apps section for the front end and machine learning section for the image classification. This project has no better place then to be hosted on open source where anyone can contribute regardless of the skills whether technical or non technical. This creates a unified platform for the students to create, collaborate on a huge basis with other developers and make something that can actually help a lot of people and in particular our saviour, Farmers of this nation under the GPL licence that is it can benefit the farmers on a open source scale.

This project will really help the students to practise their coding and developing skills which can later be used as a working project so in a way the students will be working on their skills and Github profile they will be adopting some good git practises which will be of a great use when they have to work on some realtime big projects. The project is structured well for the contributors as the mode of contribution is quite varitied and you will be working and practising for a social cause.