Do colleges have lower requirement for international students?

Would this work? Make colleges require computer programming/IT students to write a free open source program?

• I came up with an idea the other day. Have colleges make a requirement for undergraduate or graduate computer programming or IT students to create a free open source program before they graduate. Make some requirements about the minimum lines of code it needs to have, and some functional purpose (and allow students to work in teams), and within a few years time, quality programs are created that benefit everyone. OK, they may not all be quality, but there are sure to be many diamonds in the rough, and the fact that they're open source will help fix the bad ones. Students will benefit, because they will get valuable experience creating a program, and everyone else will benefit, because free programs will be created for every purpose. And because they're open source, it will help spur the creation of even better programs. Eventually, over time, there would be a free,quality program for every purpose, and people would only need to spend money on the physical aspects of a computer. I know this has already been largely accomplished, with things such as linux and firefox, but there could be so much more quality programs if this was done. What do you think? Good idea or not?

• Answer:

  That does sound like a good idea. It's true, they might not be very high quality to begin with, but the point is the good idea and the experience for the student, and the point of open source is that other people can fix it. Although, it would be hard to properly evaluate the size of the project by it's number of lines, so you would need some other measure.