New Book Helps You Start Contributing To Open Source

jrepin writes "This new book Open Advice is the answer to: 'What would you have liked to know when you started contributing?' 42 prominent free and open source software contributors give insights into the many different talents it takes to make a successful software project; coding, of course, but also design, translation, marketing and other skills. They are here to give you a head start if you are new. And if you have been contributing for a while already, they are here to give you some insight into other areas and projects."

Comments

Looks nice

[Securityemo]

It's available as a PDF from their site. I downloaded it and skimmed through a few bits, it looks nicely written and seems to contain concrete advice.

Re:Looks nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, it will be soon available at Amazon, but for now you can buy it here. The money would go to Lydia Pintscher, who has been actively involved in FOSS since 1990, and in recent years KDE. So pretty sure it will get poured into OSS development.

IMHO though, it would probably just be better to directly send donations, bug reports and patches to your favourite open source projects. :)

Re:EPUB?

[kailoran]

They publish the source .tex files at http://github.com/lydiapintscher/Open-Advice , so it's rather open.

Re:Shut up and patch/fork it yourself

[spauldo]

That's true on some projects. There are a few megalomaniac assholes out there. Some are quite successful. Some are not.

Sometimes the users are unreasonable. On smaller projects, you can't expect a two person dev team to drop everything they're working on to add whatever minor feature every user wants. In these cases, it's actually sound advice; if you want it, send us a patch, and we'll give it a try. They're not being assholes in these cases; they just don't have the time. In other cases, you have people who disagree with fundamental parts of a project. They demand sweeping changes that would affect the entire codebase. It's just not possible to make everyone happy.

If you think about it, it's not really that much different than the closed source world; software companies don't bow to the whim of every user that submits an idea. Maybe, if enough people want a feature, they'll add it - but there's no guarantee. With open source, if enough people want a feature, one of those people will probably have the ability and time to code it and submit a patch.

None of those are the reason there are 300+ Linux distros out there. There are a few distros that were forked due to poor management, but most of the time it's down to philosophical differences. Debian exists to fulfill the idea of a completely free platform. Redhat exists to make money. Slackware exists because it's been there since the dawn of time and some people like they way it does things. Ubuntu exists to provide a polished, user-friendly version of Debian. DSL exists for small installs. Many distros exist because some people decided they wanted to try making their own distro. When you get down to it, there's only really a handful of relevant distros out there - the other ones are really only for hobbyists, people with special needs, or people who want to try something different. If one of the small ones comes up with a good idea, it might get adopted by one of the big distros. It's useful, and I don't understand why people think multiple distros is a bad thing.