Students

LibreCorps is an initiative of Open@RIT that connects RIT students with opportunities that use Open Source in a humanitarian and/or civic entity. It also supports the projects of the Open@RIT Fellows Program. When openings are available, they’ll be listed at the LibreCorps website.

Some organizations students have worked with include:

• Unicef Innovation & Innovation Fund
• Night Scout
• OCP
• Open APS
• Sugar Labs
• FOSS@Magic

FOSS@MAGIC is RIT’s Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) student group based in the RIT MAGIC Center. Students in the organization actively engage with the open source community and/or start their own and show their work annually at Imagine RIT and Maker Faire Rochester.

Open@RIT is proud to support these introductory courses offered by the School of Interactive Games and Media and the Department of English. These courses are open to all students.

IGME-582 - Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development

Open Source has proven to be a key piece of the puzzle in modern humanitarian efforts. The Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development course introduces students to the tools and processes critical to Open Source development. By the end of the course, students will be contributing to humanitarian software, game and interactive media communities. Students will also document their projects on HFOSS community hubs, fully immersing them in Open Source.

ENGL-450 - Free & Open Source Culture

A lot has changed in the relationship between authorship and cultural production. That’s what the Free & Open Source Culture Course is all about. Students will utilize factors such as commerce, culture, law, and technology to analyze how the cultural norms surrounding authorship transformed over the past three centuries, and use those transformations to see the roles software and the latest media technologies can play in facilitating Free and Open cultures.

Minor: Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture

For students who wish to have a deeper understanding of, and gain greater experience in Open work,The FOSS minor extends all aspects of the immersion and extends it with courses that provide students with the practical skills of actively working in open source software communities.

Participating in open source communities is the best way to showcase to employers a student's ability to work professionally with a team, as their work is entirely transparent. Courses such as Projects in FOSS Development provide an opportunity for students to build a portfolio of work that no class project can.

Required Courses:

• ENGL-450: Free and Open Source Culture
• IGME-582: Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software
• IGME-585: Project in FOSS Development

Immersion: Free Culture and Free and Open Source Computing 

The Immersion in Free Culture and Free and Open Source Computing allows students from any background to get an initial taste of this increasingly important method of producing new technology, software, and designs.

Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software gives students an introductory understanding of the technical workings of open source software production, with topics such as licensing and community management. This is complemented by Free Culture, which covers open source's philosophical and ideological history and related topics.

Required Courses:

• ENGL-450: Free and Open Source Culture
• IGME-582: Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software