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With the continued success of its partnership with the Mozilla Foundation, Toronto’s Seneca College could be the school of choice for budding open source developers and a strong model for other tech programs around the country to follow.
Over the past couple years, the Mozilla partnership has given Seneca students the ability to work on key aspects of the Firefox Web Browser as well as other Mozilla-led initiatives such as Thunderbird, Songbird and Bugzilla. The program allows students to beef up their resumes and has even landed a few graduates continued employment with Mozilla.
The partnership kicked off in 2007, after Mozilla issued a US$50,000 grant to the school used to develop several open source and Mozilla-focused courses. The open source project donated another $100,000 earlier this year to support the on-going collaboration between Mozilla and Seneca’s Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT).
David Humphrey, a professor at Seneca’s school of computer studies who runs open source development courses for the college, said that the Mozilla partnership now expands to four different courses, all of which put students inside the Mozilla community and working with talented open source developers.
“We have two courses on our bachelor program and two in our diploma program,” he said. “We spend the first course taking the students into the Mozilla project and teaching them how to collaborate with people around the world on code. We also get them all paired up with mentors within Mozilla.”
Students can work on anything from bug fixes to completely integrating new features or tools into the Mozilla project, Humphrey added.
In the second course, the student developers are able to take their code one step further and continue to refine it. “We’ve found that having that second course really allows the work to matter,” Humphrey said. “Having a full eight months to really get immersed in this stuff and follow through on the project means the different between a toy project and something that can actually be shipped.”
One of the school’s most significant contributions to Mozilla’s Firefox project was developed last year by a recent Seneca computer studies graduate Andrew Smith. He helped implement support for a new image format, the Animated PNG (APNG), which overcomes the technical limitations of animated GIFs.
“This was really critical and has changed the way Mozilla does its user interface with Firefox 3,” Humphrey said. “By adding these animations in, it’s now possible for them to do animations that have a full Alpha channel for transparencies and so on. This will allow the user interface to be able to render animated images crisper and cleaner.”
Another recent Seneca contribution is the Plugin-watcher project, which helps notify users when on of their Firefox plug-ins fail to work correctly.
“It was one of those things where the students really wanted to work on it,” Michael Shaver, chief technology evangelist and a founding member of the Mozilla project, said. “We told them it would be hard and not to get disappointed if they didn’t finish it all in one course term.
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