Getting Started Contributing Back To Open Source

markfreeman writes "The one burning need I have felt over the last year was to get involved with open source as a contributor. I have wanted to help with documentation, advocacy, and most of all, with programming. Here's the story of how I got started, thanks to openhatch.org (which calls itself 'an open source involvement engine') and how you can too."

Comments

easiest way to get involved

[WarJolt]

many people overlook the fact that the best thing we all can do for oss is to use it.

Re:easiest way to get involved

[recrudescence]

and support / promote open projects which don't get as much money thrown into the marketing department as certain commercial projects (link back to recently covered story onthe durian open movie project)

Re:easiest way to get involved

[Ethanol-fueled]

And to demonstrate it to others without shoving it in their faces.

Re:easiest way to get involved

[Darkness404]

And to demonstrate what is better about it. Far too often OSS is portrayed as "I can't buy X, so I'll download Y" rather than "Y is better than X, so I'll download it". Look at Firefox, it didn't get to be popular by being a clone of IE, but by being better.

Re:easiest way to get involved

[scdeimos]

And to file repeatable bug reports, preferably detailed.

There, I fixed that for you.

Re:easiest way to get involved

[Anonymous Coward]

While that's true, if FOSS is ever going to become the norm, it is going to have to pay the bills as well. Coding projects require patronage, lots and lots of small amounts of money from many people. 1 million users tossing a coder a quarter goes a long way. Speaking of micropatronage, is there a way to actually practice it (efficiently), yet?

Re:easiest way to get involved

[theheadlessrabbit]

And to demonstrate what is better about it. Far too often OSS is portrayed as "I can't buy X, so I'll download Y" rather than "Y is better than X, so I'll download it". Look at Firefox, it didn't get to be popular by being a clone of IE, but by being better.

and being 'better' isn't necessarily always about OSS doing the job better than the proprietary alternative. Sometimes, it's just a better fit for a certain environment or situation, and that in itself is a reason to push OSS.

Here is an example:
A friend of mine teaches art. When they get to the photography units, he can have the class schedule their lives around access to 1 computer, he can require them to each pay hundreds of dollars for photoshop (good luck with that) encourage piracy (potential of getting caught/losing job), OR he can hand out burnt copies of Gimp to every student to use at home.

is Gimp objectively better than photoshop? no way, but it does the job, and for that situation, Gimp is a much better fit. And the Gimp GUI for the last few versions has been similar enough that what is learned in one program will work in the other.

but pushing a vastly inferior OSS project, who's only merit is that "it's free" probably does more harm than good. Lets not forget, the super expensive proprietary version is also 'free' to anyone with a high speed connection and some free time.

Re:easiest way to get involved

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

C'mon, man. My bug is, like, totally repeatable on my l33t overclocked box. Neither you nor the guy who wrote Memtest86 can code well enough to keep up with its incredible speed...

Re:easiest way to get involved

[HeronBlademaster]

That's why it's most important to look for the right context in which to introduce Linux as an alternative.

You don't try to get your Steam-junkie gamer buddy to switch to Linux. You try to get your sister who blogs and plays Facebook games to switch to Linux. It's all about seeing whose needs can be filled by Linux, and looking for those people.

And if you want to get a specific person to switch, you figure out what their needs are, and then make Linux fill those needs - you don't try to get them to change their minds about what their needs are. (Even if you'd be right to do so, it won't come across that way. This is OSX's biggest problem - if you ask on a forum "How do I maximize my windows in OSX" the replies will be mostly "you don't want to do that". That attitude earns zero conversions, and we should avoid that attitude if we want Linux to gain ground.)

(This is of course generalizable to any open source software.)

Re:easiest way to get involved

[Ailure]

Bit funny that you use "Steam-junkie gamer buddy" as a example since Steam is apparently going to be officially released on Linux within a few months. Of course, time still have to prove whenever it's good or not (GPU drivers is still somewhat problematic for Linux).

But I have to agree that you need to introduce Linux (and OSS) where it makes sense to.

Re:easiest way to get involved

[mr_mischief]

You've hit on a key issue in not just small donations but in lots of business models, too. There are problems with most payment methods for small payments.

Small checks through the mail are efficient for the sender, but are terribly inefficient for the recipient. That's even true if a stamp is used to endorse them. Then there's the small but real risk of fraudulent ACH transactions when you send an unknown entity a check. Then there are failed check hassles, too. Even small checks can be insufficient funds if someone's overdrawn already or they could write an old check on a closed account by accident.

Accepting credit and debit cards is pretty efficient for the recipient for larger values, but with fixed per-transaction fees in addition to the percentages, most merchant accounts aren't worth using if a large proportion of transactions are for small amounts.

Sending coin or currency through standard post is fairly efficient, and there's typically a reasonable risk of loss on the part of the sender if the payments are small enough. There are pretty good systems for counting coin and cash. There's an issue of security through obscurity for the recipient, though, since targeting the recipient's end of the mail could score a pretty good chunk. How does one let honest people out in the public know where to send cash while keeping the delivery end secure? A post office box is more secure than the average customer location mail drop, as are slots into a building or a locked customer box. There's still lots of people involved in getting the money there, though. People, even ones screened by the Postal Service for honesty and integrity, are always a possible weak link to security. Some projects have had at least limited success with this process, though. Barry Kauler of the Puppy Linux project accepts cash for mailing CDs to people (and would probably accept donations in cash, too). He accepts US dollars, Australian dollars, and Euros/a>. He recommends PayPal. I hope I haven't hurt the security of this system for him by mentioning it on Slashdot; anyone who's been to the Puppy site could have already known about it.

PayPal is an option. They have similar per-transaction and percentage-of-transaction fees to credit cards. For donations, they require no setup fees, no monthly fees, and no monthly minimum. There is a $0.30 transaction fee on top of the percentage for donation receipts of less than $3000 per month (if this source is timely). That makes single-dollar donations feasible but expensive. Anything less is not worthwhile. I haven't found the pricing info for donations on PayPal's site after a few minutes looking, but the prices listed at that fundraising news site are in line with their commercial payment services.

Amazon has a system that lets any Amazon customer pay you a donation for 5% plus as little as $0.05 if you're a 501(c)(3) non-profit in the US and the donation is less than $10. Check out their prices. They also have a similar low-cost cutoff for non-donation payments and even a micropayment system that tracks payments under $0.05 at 20% with a quarter-cent minimum cost for both donations and sales.

Google has Google Donations which for any US 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) non-profit (but not other 501(c) subcategories) which follows the standard transaction fees. For organizations that are qualified and are accepted into the Google Grants program, Google Donations processing is free while the organization is in good stand

Re:easiest way to get involved

[icebraining]

It never was "better" than Opera, for example, but it did provide something you can point to while annoying the neighbor.

Opera was adware until Sep. 2005. By the time it was released as freeware Firefox already had a much larger market share (11% vs ).

A 2004 review in The Washington Post described Opera 7.5 as being excessively complex and difficult to use. The review also criticized the free edition's use of obtrusive advertisements when other browsers such as Mozilla and Safari were offered free of charge without including advertisements.

Re:easiest way to get involved

[icebraining]

Bug report #2323.

Summary: Button is misaligned.

Attachments: VirtualBox image of the system.

Re:easiest way to get involved

[ThePhilips]

too often the expensive proprietary version is just that much better than the free version

With notable exception of M$Office 2003/earlier and CADs, this statement relates to the reality very loosely.

This is a fairly common problem with FOSS, and it's one of the downsides of the FOSS ideology- many FOSS projects often have great developers but tend to miss other things that proprietary vendors do not- good UI designers as well as investment into usability studies, good QA, etc.

WTF?! I use corpoware on the daily basis and what you try to advertise here is applicable optimistically to 5-10% of the said software. And the same share of FOSS is well polished and nice/easy to use.

A lot of FOSS software is developed for FOSS developers, anyone else be damned.

FOSS model is "egoistic development model" - everybody develops for himself. And many corporation also "get it" and assign developers to FOSS projects to make the adjustments - either locally or in mainline - to accommodate their business cases. What is pretty much the same as assignment of specialists to customize proprietary systems and maintain the customizations.

From a business perspective, there's often no point going free if you need more or higher paid specialists to look after said system, whilst the people who use the system are less productive.

This is the most stupid thing I have read in months.

I yet to see the aforementioned "productivity" anywhere else but marketing PowerPoint slides.

Business goes for proprietary software due to long term support contracts. And that's about 75% of reasons. The remaining 25% of reasons revolve around backward compatibility.

And assigning a specialist to "look after said system" is the same for proprietary software. With the notable difference that assigning a specialist to babysit a FOSS deployment might also result in the problems being fixed eventually - while with proprietary software that happens like ... never. (Needless to mention that licensing costs often eclipse the IT wages: often it is cheaper to hire extra IT guy than to buy another proprietary corpoware.)

I could have called our IT for the examples, but I think it is redundant. The myth that proprietary software is somehow magically better for users is just that - myth. And was debunked many many times before.

Re:easiest way to get involved

[MrResistor]

I have several Mac using friends who are quite excited about Steam for OSX. It's very cool of Valve to do that, but the selection of games is very limited. I see no reason the situation on Linux should be any better. Indeed, it will likely be worse, as developers at least make an effort to target OSX.

Of course, Steam-Linux could integrate with Wine to support Windows only games, which would be very cool IMO.

Good for you

[suso]

Glad he felt the desire to give time back. I think that one thing that can help out open source is to let the developer know that you liked their software. Bug reports are good but when they all pile up, it kinda makes development feel more like work. The next program I'm releasing soon (http://suso.suso.org/xulu/clide) is going to have a --warmfuzzy option that will allow the user to send a ping like feedback back to the author to let them know that they enjoy using the software. Kinda like a ring the bell if you liked the service thing. All too often open source tools are used and the developer doesn't have any feedback as to whether their software is being used successfully or not. I'd like to help change that.

Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I'd say "most of all documentation".

Open source documentation is ass.

Hell, almost all technical writing is ass.

For all the buzz "Natural Language" interfaces get these days you'd figure someone would strive for a "Natural Language" manual. /irony is also "ass".

Write User Documentation

[ducomputergeek]

Ain't fun. Ain't sexy. Needs to be done.

Re:Write User Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

And please don't.

Meaning almost anyone who's reading this tread. Please, don't write documentation.

You currently do, and plenty, and you're part of the problem.

Re:Write User Documentation

[dotgain]

I wish you'd somehow made your point more politely, because there is actually at least some substance to your otherwise caustic and arrogant remark.

I think what is needed the most in the way of Documentation is somehow getting rid of the old stuff, all those HOWTO's, and so on. Many of them still show up in searches for common problems, with incorrect or suboptimal solutions for today's kernels and baselayouts. The "Last modified" date is a clue to the wise, but the learner has no way of knowing that docs written 8 or so years ago are sometimes very counter-productive.

Spending a few minutes on my distros IRC channel I really is disenchanting seeing how many people immediately leap to IRC for help on the the stuff that actually is documented well and easy to find. You wonder, even if documentation were more complete, what difference would it make? Half the people who don't need the documentation end up arguing over how it's written and other stupid details, and the people who do need it don't read it.

Re:Write User Documentation

[Jurily]

How about "make it usable enough so users don't need documentation"?

Hint: how do you make Xorg play nice with laptops getting repeatedly connected to different size screens/projectors? I did RTFM, for several hours. Meanwhile, Win7 takes 3 mouse clicks the first time, then remembers your settings.

I want to stay on Linux, I really do. But I also need to Get Shit Done.

Re:Write User Documentation

[icebraining]

I think what is needed the most in the way of Documentation is somehow getting rid of the old stuff, all those HOWTO's, and so on. Many of them still show up in searches for common problems, with incorrect or suboptimal solutions for today's kernels and baselayouts. The "Last modified" date is a clue to the wise, but the learner has no way of knowing that docs written 8 or so years ago are sometimes very counter-productive.

This is important: always put a date on your how-tos! And the date your blog software puts in the corner is not enough!

Plenty of times people copy those texts to some forum, then it gets translated, etc. Even if you take your copy down, there's no guarantee it's the only available. And you know people aren't going to copy the header or footer that contains the date and such.

Re:Write User Documentation

[Antique Geekmeister]

Oh, dear Lord, user interfaces. They're tough to write well, and one of the great flaws of oopen source. Try the guidelines at the bottom of http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html.

One thing Eric missed in his rant is "throwing things out". Most of CPAN, for example, should have been flushed down the toilet as incompatible with thermodynamics, much less the last five yearf of Perl releases, years ago. Subversion should have thrown out Berkeley DB as an unstable piece of unusable debris years ago. And password based FTP should have been discarded as a bad idea 10 years ago, but Matlab continues to rely on it for upstream file transfer with no built-in HTTPS or WebDAV.

What are these idiots thinking?

Re:Write User Documentation

[Rockoon]

What are these idiots thinking?

They are thinking "I know how to do X, but I dont know how to do Y. Even though X is way worse than Y, I don't want to spend the time learning how to do Y, so I'm going to do X"

Re:There's something not quite right about this

[castoridae]

I checked out the site this guy is hawking, and their projects page lists just about every open-source project ever conceived!

Not every project... there's a curious lack of Java projects. But if you want to hack Python, boy are you in luck!

Answer Forums

[shermo]

The biggest help I've gotten about OSS has been from knowledgeable folk on forums. (And I've never been the one asking the question)

Re:There's something not quite right about this

[paulproteus]

Thanks for your thoughts on the site!

The project pages are actually generated from the list of projects people have said they contribute to. So it is all things that people on the site have worked on, in one way or another.

The point of our the project is to help people find the *official* channel to contribute, and I think having that information in another place can't hurt.

I really don't want the site to feel gross and astroturfy, since it's actually organic! So your feedback is helpful, if somewhat painful to hear. (-:

Oh, yeah, and our hosting is two little Linode virtual machines, so we do suffer a bit more than huge sites like Launchpad when a load storm comes our way. We're working on performance, too. (-:

-- asheesh at openhatch.org.

Write User Documentation - for Dummies

[Alwin Henseler]

And to add, something I'm missing in almost any documentation: write documentation that serves absolute beginners. Why? Because non-beginners already know how to use the [whatever]. So if they need more info, assume they're totally new to the subject you're documenting.

For example: so far I haven't found (online) a guide on 'how to use a computer, that has Ubuntu Linux on it' for beginners. How to configure Ubuntu: sure. What is different in Ubuntu vs. other distro's: sure. What is different in Linux vs. Windows: sure. But that's all documentation for people who are already experienced computer users. But a guide to using Ubuntu, for people who have hardly ever touched a computer: where? Show me. Let alone in localized versions...

Equally important: write docs to be read by users of the software first, not docs for co-developers. If developers need docs: do that later, but write the user documentation first. In fact, it wouldn't be bad to start a project by writing the user documentation first (and code later).

Re:Bah...

[paulproteus]

This is why OpenHatch focuses on projects that have bitesize bugs.

There are projects that *want* new contributors, and they're marking tickets in their bug trackers as good for newcomers.

You can read more about that at https://openhatch.org/blog/2009/get-involved-in-foss/.

(It's 2am, and I'm going to sleep!)

Re:There's something not quite right about this

[Kenz0r]

Funny that the first person to mention Launchpad is someone that works for OpenHatch.

Not to steal your thunder, I think OpenHatch is wonderful, but it does remind me an awful lot about launchpad.
For those of you unfamiliar with LP, launchpad.net is another site like this, that tries to get people involved with F/OSS projects.
You can contribute bugreports, fixes, Q&A about software, provide translations...
It used to be focussed around Ubuntu and Gnome (because the site is run by Canonical Inc.), but nowadays the site has really taken off (no pun intended) and hosts many kinds of FOSS projects.

I like how OpenHatch makes FOSS-involvement something you can boast about on forums/social networking sites using their HTML widget.
It makes me want to get my hands dirty and get involved :)

Re:There's something not quite right about this

[VTI9600]

The point of our the project is to help people find the *official* channel to contribute, and I think having that information in another place can't hurt.

If that is truly your goal then why don't you try doing some of your own research (such as contacting project leads, collecting activity stats, etc.) to develop content for your site rather than trying to just be "organic"? Sure, it's a lot of work, but quality content from authoritative sources still matters. I wish that more Web 2.0 types would put in the effort to create it, rather than just dropping a fishing line out in the interwebs to see if something bites.

I miss the days when content was king, and having some high-quality content in the beginning could really help kick-start the organic process. For every success story like slashdot, wikipedia, or whatever, there's a graveyard of hundreds that fell flat trying to harvest the world's collective intelligence onto their site. Do some of the legwork you expect from your users and, at the very least, you'll gain valuable insight for your business.

Openhatch/Bite-size bugs complaint...

[adamofgreyskull]

I picked a bite-size bug at random from the first page of results for PHP bugs: Bug 17497 - Add oasis opendocument and oo.o legacy document to mime.types.
The bug was created a year ago and has some activity on it, including a patch. Looking at that history though, it's not clear whether the problem has been fixed nor what action is now required. The actual fix is seemingly simple, but no-one can agree on the exact form the simple fix should take. I wouldn't say that's a great introduction for a newbie to the project.

Re:Openhatch/Bite-size bugs complaint...

[markfreeman]

I agree, this is a big issue. Quite a few times I have gone through bug trackers looking at items to see that patches had already been submitted, bit the issue still wasn't marked resolved. One thing maintainers can do is review and give feedback on submitted patches. Letting something 'sit on the vine and rot' isn't helping the project and doesn't make people want to contribute.

ThunderBird bug #92165?

[Animaether]

Reminds me of ThunderBird bug #92165 - Cannot rename a local folder to its current name with different case

Although the apparent action required there is that...
laymen, who merely encounter the bug, find it odd, and go through the trouble of creating a mozilla bugzilla account to post on the topic.. are told by the people who understand the bug and know exactly how to fix it, to create a patch themselves if they find it so important.

If that is the general response people who are enthusiastic about open source projects (given that there's plenty of other free-as-in-beer mail apps) are greeted with, I can see why a newbie programmer would raise an eyebrow and think to themselves that submitting a patch is likely going to be greeted with "if people want this fixed, they can take your patch and re-build thunderbird themselves".

Re:There's something not quite right about this

[paulproteus]

We are contacting project leads. I'm reaching out to my friends and the projects they're working on, and blogging about this stuff on Planet Debian (since I'm a Developer on Debian).

http://openhatch.org/wiki/Bug_trackers is where we ask that project leads write about their bug trackers so we can import them into openhatch.org/search/. We're trying to find more projects that label bugs as "bitesize."

On project pages, we're hoping that the people who add projects to their profiles follow the link and leave a note. Maybe we could nudge people with a bigger message, asking them to do that?