Open Source Software Isn’t Just Code. It’s Your Résumé

OpenStack isn’t just a way for tech giants like HP and IBM to mimic Amazon’s wildly successful cloud services. It’s also a teaching tool.

Created little more than three years ago by NASA and cloud computing outfit Rackspace, OpenStack is an open source project in the truest sense of the term. Hundreds of developers are now contributing to the project, and these developers span myriad different companies, including not only HP and IBM, but the networking giant Cisco, virtualization kingpin VMware, and myriad startups. And then there’s Dinkar Sitaram, a professor at the PES Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India who’s using OpenStack to immerse his students in the ways of open source software.

Sitaram has long encouraged his students to contribute to open source projects, and now he’s taking things a step further, teaming up with OpenStack India — a local developer group — to run seminars where students learn the open source way by jumping headfirst into OpenStack. The aim is to educate them, but also make them more attractive to employers. [...]