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Unsung Heroes of Open Source
Yosef writes "Jon Udell uses his experience from using and hacking the free software BitPim to say that developers of such less-known projects are the true heroes of open source: 'For solving a host of vexing problems with quiet competence, and for doing it in ways that invite others to stand on their shoulders, I salute them all.'"
We could all thank them by donating a buck or two to their projects.
Do you use Linux? Know how to code?
If so, then you can be a hero too. I never paid for software in the form of money, I personally feel it is alright to spend some of the saved money in the form of personal time when I find bugs, missing features and so on. Sadly, I am not a very experienced programmer, but I have managed to get some small patches into Open Source projects.
This is how you can be a hero also, even if it is just a line of code - the sum of all small snippets like that does eventually help the evolution of Open Source.
So skilled or not, you can be a hero too! Some are great big heros, but even if you just translated a text string, fixed a few lines or code, or just made some graphics -- then you are a small hero (in my eyes) also!
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I would say the gentleman behind HT Track is an unsung hero. I sent him a bug report with pseudo-code as a guess to how to fix it. The very next day, he had sent me a thank-you email and had released a new version. I also found the Mozilla team to be very responsive to my suggestions here on Slashdot (one post turned into a new Mozilla feature -- pre-fetching). And the HTML-Kit team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. I like all three teams at the geek level. Their products satisfy an important niche in Web development, they're responsive and accept code patches (even my poorly done offerings, with cleanup of course). I feel quite happy to call them unsung heroes of the OSS movement, and this is my second shot at singing their praises (see previous "unsung heroes of open source" article).
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You don't need to code to help out OSS.
Finding bugs, fix spelling mistakes, doing thorough reviews or usability studies, translating help into different languages or even setting you granny up with Linux all go to help OSS.
I think the translates do a Gem of a job, and make OSS accessible to a huge proportion of the world.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It's true. Lately I've been noticing that living in the open source universe can be a lot like attending high school: everything is a popularity contest. If you're not one of the "cool kids" you don't get any attention, even if what you're working on is more mature, more sophisticated, and just plain better than what they're working on.
What I'm about to say is probably not going to be taken well, but here goes anyway: Slashdot is probably the "football team / cheerleading squad" of the open source high school -- the place where the coolest of the cool get the most concentrated doses of glory and attention. There are certain people (whose names I shall not defame in this post, lest I get moderated down to -99 or something) who could make a stupid remark about how they think it would be better if people didn't wear matching shoes, and Slashdot would run half a dozen stories about it.
The best example of unsung heroes might be Linas Vepstas. He wasn't one of the "cool kids" so the world pretty much ignored his project, which was to port Linux to IBM mainframes -- he actually got it working, for the most part. IBM ignored his work and went it alone, and nobody knows much about Linas Vepstas now.
Unsung heroes indeed. Let's all try to avoid making open source a fashion show. Most of our best technology was built by nerds, and nerds aren't known for their social skills.
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The guy that wrote like half the ethernet drivers (including all the 3com ones) in the main kernel tree, among other things. You need that NIC support, after all! ;)