"Roman Tuma, software practice director at Sun Microsystems,
Asia South, said the open source model offers an entirely new way
for developers and "increasingly knowledgeable", interactive users
to collaborate and build upon the shared work done in the
development of OSS.
"Arun Kumar, senior director, services and pre-sales at Red Hat,
emphasized in a phone interview that there are two types of
learning--theoretical and hands-on practical learning.
""In the past, I was given a piece of software, I was told how
it would work, and I had no way to contribute any kind of valuable
feedback," he said. However, he added that with open source, the
instructor, in a hands-on lesson on device drivers, would start
teaching the theory aspect and then reveal the driver's actual
source code to the students.
"According to Kumar, this mode of teaching challenges the
students to think about how they would write a device driver."