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

[Ethanol-fueled]

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

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

[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.

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.

Write User Documentation

[ducomputergeek]

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

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.

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.