Open Source Projects For Beginners

itwbennett writes "Whoever said 'everyone has to start somewhere' has clearly never tried contributing to an open source project — the Linux Kernel development team in particular is known for its savagery. But if you're determined to donate your time and talents, there are some things you can do to get off on the right foot. Of course you should pick something you're interested in and that you use. Check, and double check. You should also research the project, learn about the process for contributing, and do your utmost to avoid asking questions that you can find the answers to. But beyond that there are some hallmarks of beginner-friendly open source projects like Drupal, Python, and LibreOffice — namely, a friendly and active community, training and mentorship programs, and a low barrier to entry."

Comments

Re:I cringe whenever I see this name

[gatkinso]

I get hungry for Nachos.

Re:I cringe whenever I see this name

[datavirtue]

I always picture the slap-fight scene in Nacho Libre. Forever damaged.

All projects need your help.

[Lumpy]

Beginners and non programmers can even help. 99.99786% of all OSS projects desperately need help with documentation. IF you want to start somewhere, start there.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, most OSS projects need technical writers and designers more than they need more programmers. But many of them only let in programmers, most of whom can't write or design worth a shit (and would consider it beneath them even if they could). And most technical writers and designers who do try to sign up get turned off pretty fast by being treated like shit by arrogant programmers.

Re:All projects need your help.

[jellomizer]

The problem with Open Source Software is the intense focus on the freaking source code. But for most software projects Coding source code is only 40% of the work. There is a lot of work going in Architecting, Designing, Documentation, that goes on as well. For most project they have the Coder do all the work, that is why they write a few dozen lines of code a day because they are busy doing the other stuff.

RMS may not have gone insane if the printer manufacturer just released better documentation of the specs for the printer. To allow him do what he needed to do without the source.

Re:All projects need your help.

[drinkypoo]

And most technical writers and designers who do try to sign up get turned off pretty fast by being treated like shit by arrogant programmers.

It takes programmers being convinced that a program needs proper documentation for it to get it. Then the programmers will hopefully write bad but correct documentation, and then someone else can bash them into useful docs. Unfortunately, the prevailing situation with most FOSS projects with no (or effectively no) documentation is that a non-programmer cannot write the documentation, because only a programmer can understand what it should say, by reading the code. And if the code is confusing (I will avoid using the term "crap" here, though I very much want to use it) as it so often is, then it can be horribly difficult to figure out what it actually does even if one is a programmer.

Programmers need to take documentation into account early in the process, not as an afterthought. If you can't write at least useful documentation, then you're lacking. It doesn't need to be good, someone else can massage it. It does need to be correct and you do need to make time for it.

Re:All projects need your help.

[BasilBrush]

Sadly, most OSS projects need technical writers and designers more than they need more programmers. But many of them only let in programmers, most of whom can't write or design worth a shit (and would consider it beneath them even if they could). And most technical writers and designers who do try to sign up get turned off pretty fast by being treated like shit by arrogant programmers.

Absolutely. The OSS projects that are applications could certainly do with UX designers, but the chances of programmers listening to a UX designer saying that stuff should be removed from the interface are slim. Look at the backlash Ubuntu got from coders for bringing their desktop into the 21st century.

Re:All projects need your help.

[geminidomino]

If "UX" means "turning a computer into a fucking cell phone," as implied by your delirious shout-out to Unity, then I think there are already more than enough of those unholy bastards infecting OSS already, tyvm.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

My mod points just ran out or you'd have had a (+1, Insightful) for that.

As you say, the major difference between most successful FOSS projects and most successful CCSS ones probably isn't the programming, it's everything else. It's the vision and creativity and market research. It's the willingness and ability to commit entire teams for weeks in a row to completely rewrite an area of the UI that wasn't working quite as well as it could. It's spending time and money to implement tedious file conversion code and license relevant technologies, because people in the real world need to use the de facto standard proprietary formats, even if they are patent-encumbered. It's hiring a team of technical writers and illustrators to produce a user-friendly help system that actually does help. It's spending a small fortune running observation tests with actual users to find the most important problems, and then fixing those first. In short, it's having leadership/management who are user-focussed and able to direct their resources objectively to where they will make the most difference to those users.

Re:All projects need your help.

[h4rr4r]

You mean crippling it?

Not everything needs to be dombed down that far. If the 21st century is I can only use one application at a time and the mouse is the primary input device, then I will stick with the 20th century.

Re:All projects need your help.

[uncqual]

Indeed. Looking at the code and fully understanding the logic as a basis creating documentation is insufficient in many cases without quite a bit of help from "programmers". Unfortunately, in most projects (both commercial and FOSS), there are many bugs "implemented".

With the dearth of requirements and consistent and coherent design documents and useful code comments, in many projects too often the only way to determine if it's a bug, a feature (perhaps some corner of legacy crap left in intentionally for a handful of users which has never been deprecated), an 'undocumented behavior' that "doesn't matter" is to "ask the expert". If a project has one "expert" who can overrule all others and who engages in resolution of detailed discrepancies, this can work well. If, however, the project is "consensus based", every "expert" can support a different resolution leaving the well meaning documentation writer in the cold. (And I'm ignoring those FOSS projects where there are multiple commercial competing consultancies who are trying to be "top dog" and childishly jump on a situation like this to use as a pawn or a springboard for largely unrelated conflicts - I'm sure this problem resonates some readers here!).

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Making user interfaces more intuitive is a noble goal... But... This goal should never compromise the software's functionality or efficiency. Function over Form should be a core value. Under no circumstance should useful functionality or efficiency shortcuts be removed for the sole reason that a UX designer did not know where to put/hide it.

This is what is wrong with the recent trends trying to transform our powerful general purpose computers and software into idiot-proof appliances. UX designers can be very valuable to software development, but their values and ideas need to be adequately balanced with those of the users who need to get work done efficiently and the developers who need to implement it.

Re:All projects need your help.

[BasilBrush]

Thanks for demonstrating my point so well.

This is why Linux never succeeded on the desktop. But when an entirely commercial organisation took on designing a Linux user interface - Android - with programmers implementing designs from UX experts, suddenly it's successful.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to be that one coded to documentation, not the other way around. I see it's been watered down to code to unit tests these days. Which sadly dont get done much either.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Android is successful on mobile phones, not on desktops. Microsoft also tried to bring a mobile interface to the desktop with Windows 8, and it's an utter fiasco.

Re:All projects need your help.

[D1G1T]

a non-programmer cannot write the documentation, because only a programmer can understand what it should say, by reading the code.

I think the head post was talking about end-user docs not code documentation. You hardly need the original programmer to start the Users' Guide.

Re:All projects need your help.

[gl4ss]

non programmer who knows how to use the program CAN write documentation about how to use the program.
many, many guides on the net are done this way and they tend to be helpful. sometimes the author just got there by experimenting how the software ACTUALLY works.

sometimes, if the documentation is by the coder it's just wishful thinking about how he hopes the sw would work - or worse yet the documentation is just an advertisement and blatantly ignores the limits of the software, whereas a trial-by-fire written documentation usually shows what you can actually do with the sw, what works and what will cause a crash. many guides about how to get some game running for example have been written with no source access at all, yet they cover unplanned(buggy) behavior of the program..

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainstream GNU/Linux succeeded with technical people.

Android/Linux succeeded with non-technical people.

Your mistake is assuming the technical people involved in GNU/Linux give a flying fuck whether it succeeds with non-technical people -- some do, but most don't. And unless you've got string feelings about open-source software, if you do care about success with non-technical people, OS X is the obvious choice.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to be that one coded to documentation, not the other way around. I see it's been watered down to code to unit tests these days. Which sadly dont get done much either.

95%.. no make it 99% of unit tests just test that the code goes through without crashing. Proving nothing about the code actually working through when linked together and proving even less that the code would do what the customer wanted! So essentially they end up being just as useful as checking that it compiles!

Part of the problem is that it's impossible to write good unit tests before you know what the code must do and you only know that after you have written the code since you had no specifications of any kind to begin with and the wishes of whoever was paying for the project are always in constant flux. However since unit tests were a necessity they are written after the code is otherwise ready.

Kind of hard to write to documentation before coding when there is no roadmap about what the software is even meant to do! What this means is that the software isn't written to fill a need but quite oppositely made to trap human interest.

Re:All projects need your help.

[tnk1]

Having an intuitive UI is related to your audience. If you have software that is specialized for a group that is willing to take a longer time to learn it, presumably for some specific reason, you can make it fairly complex.

If you are trying to drive adoption by those who are less sure about what they want, an interface that starts simple but can be extended or given more functionality is not only nice, it is often the difference between your functionality being used... or not. Designing a good interface improves efficiency because it saves time, not only in a good workflow sense, but also in the sense that it does not require a significant commitment to learn. If you want to showcase a new function, you do not want your interface getting in the way of demonstrating it.

I cannot count the number of apps where I download it for one specific reason, and I'm supposed to be awed by all the wonderful flexibility that the interface doesn't hide from me. Instead, I'm disgusted that I have to do some stupid non-intuitive chain of actions just because no one actually handed the app to someone who had never used it before and took notes.

Outside of a professional tool in the hands of a specialist, it is rare that you use most of the functionality of an application. You do certain things repetitively, and then, if necessary, you use other functions as needed. Those "as needed" functions do NOT belong in a place where they occlude or even sit alongside the repetitive functions.

If there is anything that these minimizing UX designers do get right, it is the fact that you aren't going to need a screen full of options that you only rarely use, and so you don't need to waste the effort of browsing them. Programmers, understandably, want the work they have done to be showcased, but what is right for a programmer's pride is not always right for an end user. You may well have designed an elegant new way of doing something, but if the use cases for it are limited, it shouldn't be presented center-stage (unless a user elects to do so via preferences).

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

...It's hiring a team of technical writers and illustrators to produce a user-friendly help system that actually does help. It's spending a small fortune running observation tests with actual users to find the most important problems, and then fixing those first. In short, it's having leadership/management who are user-focussed and able to direct their resources objectively to where they will make the most difference to those users.

Please provide a link as I wish to use this helpful software

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what annoys me the most about the Linux community. You say most don't "give a flying fuck whether it succeds with non-technical people", but I've been hearing "Use Linux! Switch to Linux!" whenever someone mentions Windows. You know what I mean...obviously, the Linux community wants it to succeed with non-technical people. But if the technical people-programmers and designers-don't give a flying fuck, then...it won't. BasilBrush's point was just that. Google took Linux and made a well-done interface for it, and it succeeded. I don't care that it's for mobile devices, the point is that if you take the time to make an excellent interface, it has a much better chance of being widely adopted.

Linux can't have it both ways. You can't have coders not give a flying fuck and make it for techies and have it succeed for the non-techies.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm guessing you're just trolling, but here are some obvious examples:

• http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/
• http://www.apple.com/ipad/
• http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop.html

Re:All projects need your help.

[Requiem18th]

I'd give you points if I had them.

What Linux needs the most are a) advertising, and b) be the default OS of gray/white box machines.

The main problem with Linux is that it arrived too late. The core of Linux is just as good when not better than Windows' but it lacks 3rd party applications because... nobody uses Linux. It's a chicken and eggs problem.

Re:All projects need your help.

[kermidge]

Here, here. Right on.

Re:All projects need your help.

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Thinking on unit testing is dominated by a small group of gurus who have been effective at establishing a few articles of faith on the topic and most programmers reflexively agree with those opinions in order to make a public demonstration that they *understand* unit testing and can be taken seriously. Article of Faith #1 - don't write unit tests for private methods. It's ridiculous and wrongheaded to never test private methods. There is nothing about a private method that makes it any less complex, any less prone to error or any less worthy of being tested than the public API. It's not hard to see that SOME private methods will only be invoked in rare circumstances which you won't easily think to test for when viewing the program from the POV of /the public API . This is even more true if private methods call private methods. Five deep, throw in some case logic in each and you've got a combinatorial explosion of test cases at the API level one of which recommend themselves naturally. Sure, in theory it can be done, but in theory, you need not make mistakes in the first place and have no need for unit testing. Article of Faith #2: Another thing that makes unit testing an exercise in checkbox punching is the idea that you should never write a line of code before the unit test is written. The person who came up with this idea does not program things which are not already clear cut. I know my methods will be refactored, I know my classes will come and go. i know what I think is my driving use case will change utterly as I iterative discover what REALLY needs to be done. Writing millions of unit test cases that will ultimately be thrown away is a literal waste of time. There's more but it's enough. Unit tests are often useless because it's just an exercise in confirming your expected input, not *really* thinking about how things can go wrong.

Re:All projects need your help.

[cjjjer]

Android/Linux succeeded with non-technical people

Seriously, you think that the majority of Android phone users know it is built upon Linux? You give these people more credit than I would. It succeeded due to the Fisher Price interface of current smartphones.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Any programmer who doesn't document their app shouldn't get instructions for any piece of furniture they ever have to assemble moving forward. Document the results, present to the rest of the community: mass documentation.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd give you points if I had them.

What Linux needs the most are a) advertising, and b) be the default OS of gray/white box machines.

The main problem with Linux is that it arrived too late. The core of Linux is just as good when not better than Windows' but it lacks 3rd party applications because... nobody uses Linux. It's a chicken and eggs problem.

I don't know about Linux being too late. Yes, it was too late to compete with WIndows in it heyday. However, as the OS becomes less important as we move to mobile platforms, Linux will probably thrive on the desktop as it does on phones and tablets. Why? Because MS won't ever make Windows open source and they'll be required to maintain it as revenue diminishes because people are choosing web (aka. cloud) based systems.

Eventually, it'll be too expensive to maintain Windows for the desktop. The only thing MS can do to keep Windows relevant at the desktop is do what they've always done: Try to force their one-off implementations of standards on the rest of the world so that people are forces to buy Windows.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

By the same token, it should not be up to the designer nor the programmer which tools or options are most used. Even within a very simple application, different users will do things differently (assuming there are different things which can be done). Forcing a single UI on the entire user base is pretty foolish. Case in point: Microsoft's "ribbon"

Re:All projects need your help.

[PlastikMissle]

So because it has a Fisher-Price interface (something you personally don't like) makes it's success irrelevant? Just because it doesn't say Linux on the sticker makes it somehow not Linux? That's exactly the sort of arrogance that has kept Linux away from the common users all these years.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

When programming:

Step 1) Get the specifications
Step 2) Design the system for those specification
Step 3) Write Unit Tests
Step 4) Write code for Unit tests

If you write code before Specification or Unit tests, you're going to be in for a world of hurt. Don't forget, your Unit Tests should rarely change once written.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Between the craptastic documentation of many OpenSource software and the lack of "check boxes", it's hard to configure much software correctly. Not everything is this way, but there should not be as much as their is.

Re:All projects need your help.

[geminidomino]

That's because Android puts a Phone/tablet interface on PHONES and GODDAMN TABLETS.

This single-window, single-task garbage has nothing to do with "why linux never succeeded on the desktop." It just wasn't enough TO make linux succeed on the desktop. It just means that it wasn't enough to MAKE Linux take off on the desktop. And that's not really surprising, because it's idiotic and counterproductive. The "hard core geeks" hated it when Ubuntu brought it to Linux, and everyone else hated it when Microsoft brought the misfeature to windows. So much that MS is actually back-pedaling on it in Windows 8 SP1.

It's horrible design that self-proclaimed "UX" experts (who throw up a big "full of shit" red flag by inventing a new masturbatory nonsense phrase for themselves) are completely clueless to anything that's actually important in software interface design. It's more important to them that iPads and Droids are popular, so why should they worry about dorky things like "use cases." There's a reason you don't drive a car with a flight yoke, why TVs moved to buttons instead of knobs, and why you don't use a single-task touchscreen interface on a non-touchscreen goddamned computer.

Re:All projects need your help.

[larry bagina]

Strange conclusion. BeOS and NeXT both had professional UX experts but weren't successful on the desktop. Android was in the right place at the right time with the right price.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The core of Linux is just as good..." huh?? The Linux core is superior to the Windows core in every way.

Re:All projects need your help.

[houstonbofh]

This backlash was because coders know what a regression is, and UX designers do not. They also cn not graps the fact that a regression may or may not effect all users. The equivalent was when the kernel devs introduced a regression into the nvidia drivers, and told everyone to piss off about it. People bitched then too...

Re:All projects need your help.

[houstonbofh]

Even more than that is support. When you are first learning a project, it takes a lot of work... And soon you can help others with what you learned last week. Nothing gets a developers attention faster than someone else telling new users "you must foo before bar will work" for the 357th time. Not only does it help you learn the project better and faster, it also builds tremendous street cred with the people who matter...

Re:All projects need your help.

[BasilBrush]

Strange conclusion. BeOS and NeXT both had professional UX experts but weren't successful on the desktop.

NeXTSTEP is the second most popular desktop OS in the world right now. As everyone who programs in Cocoa is constantly reminded. For sure it's had a change of name and a change of owner. And it has of course progressed a lot in it's 25 year history. But it's still the same NeXTSTEP.

For sure it's a shame BeOS died. And it was indeed due to a succession of bad business models rather then anything to do UX. I'd have a lot more enthusiasm for the OSS movement if they'd concentrated their efforts on Haiku rather than Linux.

Re:All projects need your help.

[BasilBrush]

This backlash was because coders know what a regression is, and UX designers do not.

Of course they do. This kind of condescension to fellow professionals IN THEIR SPECIALIST FIELD is exactly what I'm talking about. You illustrate the problem perfectly.

Regressions in code is your field. Regressions in UX is theirs.

The problem is that you make the mistake of thinking that features should only be added, not taken away. That doesn't even follow for code, let alone UIs. You haven't been coding long if you haven't seen plenty of APIs calls go from current to deprecated to unsupported to gone.

And why? Either because a piece of functionality is no longer needed. Or because someone came up with a better way. Am I talking about code or UI? Both!

Actually, looking at your username, are you even a coder?

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody does this because non-programmers and beginners aren't good at understanding the big-picture required for writing decent documentation.

That's not a slight against the beginners & non-programmers, it's a recognition that extracting the information required for writing usable documentation itself requires skills.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

I see this so often.
How is a beginner supposed to write documentation for a code base they've never seen before?
You'd either have to go through the code yourself and figure out what it does, or ask whoever wrote it.
Assuming you're a beginner the first is probably not something you'd want to do, and in the second case you might as well ask the developer to write the documentation themselves.

Re:All projects need your help.

[F.Ultra]

In what way is Unity single-window and single-task?

Re:All projects need your help.

[excelsior_gr]

What?! Now you demonstrated his point. Android is a phone OS, not a desktop OS. Get a grip.

Re:All projects need your help.

[excelsior_gr]

I think Linux has too many applications, not too few. We have hundreds of distros because everyone feels that their distro is the best collection of applications and the best combination of UI/package manager/whatever. And we cannot change that, because it's just how the Linux ecosystem works.

We need to decide on a collection of applications and make them standard. But good luck with that...

Re:All projects need your help.

[BasilBrush]

It's a shame you can't follow the flow of a simple discussion.

Re:All projects need your help.

[excelsior_gr]

whatever...

Re:All projects need your help.

[jgrahn]

I'm guessing you're just trolling, but here are some obvious examples:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/
http://www.apple.com/ipad/
http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop.html

That makes sense; when I read your first posting praising the quality of proprietary software, my reaction was "that's funny; most proprietary software I've used sucked much worse than the free ones, had lower-quality documentation and everything". Microsoft's flagship products are an exception (although of course they don't do what I need, at least they are coherent and polished).

I haven't used an iPad or Photoshop, but they are also among the very few flagship products which get money and talent thrown at them.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mistake is assuming the technical people involved in GNU/Linux give a flying fuck whether it succeeds with non-technical people -- some do, but most don't.

Then such people also need to stop bitching about Microsoft and stop waving the "switch to Linux" flag for such a user-hostile OS, it is *not* user-friendly, it is brilliant in many ways and as we have seen it can be leveraged to create fantastic user experiences in embedded devices but in its original form on desktop computers it most certainly is not user-friendly. Desktop computing has been the main form of end-user computing for nearly 3 decades throughout which a user could have easily installed a linux distribution but this lack of consumer focus has meant it was never competitive in that market.

If - in terms of desktop computing - it is an OS for techies then fine, it can stay niche and virtually unused in that market, but then all the anti-MS, anti-Apple whinging can stop because clearly the lack of consumer focus proves without a doubt that the linux community isn't trying to compete in that market anyway.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have spent 30 years trying to get into a market and failed time and time again you eventually need some sort of justification, in this case a fairly childish "we didn't want you to use it anyway". There have been countless opportunities over the years where Microsoft has stumbled yet Linux's failures in end user experience meant they didnt capitalize. And now we're seeing the FOSS movement fall on its face again with Android, a free and open source operating system (sans some drivers) which is naturally also an open platform where they could really push the FOSS movement in user applications, but no, instead they are bogged down in the argument over drivers (which no end user gives a shit about) and making a "truly free" mobile OS, all the while we see proprietary applications - not FOSS ones - dominating the user space. Nobody is going to use your operating system if you have no programs - we've already been through that, obviously no lesson learned - and futzing around with open source drivers is virtually pointless if the user space is dominated by proprietary applications anyway.

The upshot is that the FOSS community needs to start caring about the user, the only "free" users care about directly is money, even the governments who have switched to linux only parade the reduced monetary licensing cost, so getting traction with the FOSS movement requires building good applications that people actually want to use, after 30 years that still isn't happening.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Extreme virginity detected.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Spugglefink]

I started that way, and ten years later I'm running the project I started documenting. I've never been a real programmer, but I have basic programming skills. You can go a long way if you're trying to accomplish something you really want to do. Then again, the majority of would-be contributors to this project over the years have been useless. I'm an outlier, not a common phenomenon. Getting the right mix of abilities and motivation and compatibility with the common project goals is actually really hard. Most people are like the guys who helped me plant trees one time, where I had to go back and plant all the trees again after they left. Volunteering to feel good about yourself for volunteering doesn't really help the project go forward.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

There's certainly plenty of bad proprietary software out there too, no argument there. But if there's one really unfortunate thing that applies almost across the board in the FOSS world, it's the lack of that user focus.

Most FOSS is developed either by people interested in scratching their own itch (which I'm not at all saying is a problem, but those itches might not be the same as most people's) or by companies that make their money from consulting on it (which can create an unfortunate conflict of interest as far as quality and usability are concerned). Most proprietary software is developed by people or companies whose interest is in scratching as many people's itches as possible so they get paid as often as possible. Those different motivations naturally lead to different kinds of development process and ultimately to different emphases in the resulting software.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Linux never succeeded on the desktop.

Bullshit. I can scarcely remember reading the documentation for any GUI program regardless of platform. Not on Windows, not on mac, not on Android, not on Linux. Most users are like that. They click buttons until it does what he wants. If it doesn't do what they want they Google it which likely won't even lead back to some official source of documentation by the developers.

It's more likely to need documentation for command line utilities that no one but geeks use. And you know what? Info and man pages for all of them.

I don't understand the insistence that documentation as the downfall of Linux when either it either exist in great volume or is completely unnecessary and never read by users. There really doesn't seem to be much of anything that's between those two categories.

Anyone read the help file on an Android app? Millions of apps and none of them documented, yet somehow doing just fine.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

It succeeded due to the Fisher Price interface of current smartphones.

And desktop linux has failed time and time again thanks to its user-hostile interface, we already know this. It's proven itself over time that Linux is most successful and powerful in places where the end user knows nothing about it and doesn't have to interact with it (servers and embedded systems) and when the user *does* have to interact with it (desktop operating system) it fails. The one caveat to that is if you're developing a product like Android that has a clear user focus and abstracts away all the Linux elements, which of course we see with the legions of Linux fans telling us all how Android is not "true Linux", which really means it's been done right!

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

In what way is Unity single-window and single-task?

In the way that it helps his point to suggest is - even though it isn't. The same as with Windows 8, nobody who dislikes the fullscreen, single application approach has changed their workflow to use it, they are using the same muli-window, multi-tasking workflow they used in previous Windows versions, even on tablets. Though if im using it on a non-docket tablet i find the "metro" versions of mail, ie, skype and teamviewer much easier than their desktop counterparts, only annoying thing is it doesn't default to desktop when docked.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

And, in conclusion, there is no perfect desktop OS UI, there are only perfect desktop OS UIs.

'nuff said

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, it's having the balls to releasing a 200 MB program for doing something you could do with a script and a bit of education, and call it a "product". Then selling you update after update, because you cannot understand that you really don't need that stupid "product" to start.

That's how successful closes projects are made.

Re:All projects need your help.

[gronofer]

Only if you consider Windows 3.1 to be already in its heyday. True, that was when it became popular. But in those days Linux was actually far more advanced than Windows. Windows was still running on DOS, was 16 bit and crashing every 10 minutes, and you had to pay for it. Linux still couldn't win.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Flodis]

I love unit testing. It makes me a lot more productive as a coder - especially if I'm revisiting old code. I can make changes pretty freely without having to analyse the code in detail. I hope that establishes me as a unit test proponent. Now, to visit the articles of faith;
(1) - I definitely write unit tests for, and especially involving, private methods. They are typically the most granular, allowing you to test the smallest 'unit', and are doubly interesting because they may capture objects in an 'unclean' state.

(2) I often start off writing a 'UsageTest'-method that isn't a unit test per se, but lets me imagine a usage scenario for an aspect of the class I'm about to create. The 'UsageTest' method puts me in the role of the coder going to use the tested class. It lets me get a feel for how I would want the class to work, for example see which parameters I have convenient access to, rather than which parameters the class would prefer.
The 'UsageTest' method(s) then become some kind of 'Intended Usage' documentation.
I find this to be a pretty good way to keep focus on what you need to implement to make the class work, rather than just creating methods at whim until they can be refactored and coerced into a workflow.

Re:All projects need your help.

[unixisc]

It is arguable whether NEXTSTEP can be called the same as OS-X. Sure, the underpinnings are common - Mach 2.5 vs Mach 3.0, BSD vs FBSD, and so on. But Display Postscript has been completely replaced by Quartz, and the UI, which lives on in GNUSTEP, is certainly not the same as Aqua. In fact, the closest thing to Aqua amongst X based DEs is XFCE, not WindowMaker or AfterStep.

I do think it's a shame that NEXTSTEP and BeOS went away. Yeah, one could simulate the NEXT look & feel w/ WindowMaker, but somehow, it's just not the same - I mean, do NEXT tool builders still exist there? BeOS - it's a shame they couldn't get the PPC clonemakers like Motorola, Power Computing & Umax to adapt their OS, b'cos had they done so, there would have been one more computing platform out there.

Re:All projects need your help.

[BasilBrush]

It is arguable whether NEXTSTEP can be called the same as OS-X

Is Ubuntu still Ubuntu when they've changed various components. Such as from Gnome to Unity?

But Display Postscript has been completely replaced by Quartz

Right, but even there, they've essentially upgraded from a Display Postscript engine to a PDF engine.

the UI, which lives on in GNUSTEP, is certainly not the same as Aqua

Were both Windows 3 and Windows Vista both Windows? Stuff has been added along the way, like a taskbar and a start button. But it's still Windows.

Today's Cocoa is the AppKit and FrameWork APIs that go all the way back to NeXTSTEP or at least OPENSTEP if you want to be picky. The same patterns are used, the same classes. Even the same NS prefix used on all the same basic classes, permanently marking it's heritage. The same Interface Builder is used, though a few years ago it was embedded in XCode. For sure it got a makeover to make it look more like the Mac OS line, but it's still just 25 years of development, not something different.

BeOS too, had it survived would look different now. The rectangular embossed grey look was a 1990s thing.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Requiem18th]

Because of lack of marketing and because of lack of OEM support. Remember, people buyed their OS from boxes in those days. And there was no Internet. If it wasn't in the store it didn't exist.

Re:All projects need your help.

[houstonbofh]

Either because a piece of functionality is no longer needed...

Needed by whome? The needs of Gnome Pannel users were not taken seriously at all. And they let people know. For example, Unity, Gnmoe Shell, and other phone type UIs seriously get in the way of how I do work with lots of different information sources at once. This is you trying to replace my pickup with a Prius when I deliver furniture for a living.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Lumpy]

And Programmers are?

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love to test repeating units.

Re:All projects need your help.

[chrismcb]

The main problem with Linux is that it arrived too late.

Consider that UNIX has been around a bit longer than Window's, that really isn't Linux's issue. The issue was (is?) the poor design of the desktop UI, and how hard it is for no techs to use it. Windows is hard enough, and it is significantly easier to use than Linux distributions.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

So now different people involved in a project can't have differing goals and opinions?

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux: 1991. Windows 95: 1995.

Or, if you like, Windows 95: 1995. X: 1984. Windows 1.0: a few months after X was released. Wiki has a wonderful page showing how Microsoft were later to the party than pretty much everyone else.

So, yeah, that ain't it.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a different AC, but I want to point out that you're suggesting an Open Source project, to compete, needs someone willing to through a lot of money at their particular project in order for it to be successful. Spend a few minutes thinking about that, and then a few more minutes trying to work out why this isn't always correct.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

My point is not so much that I think OSS must involve spending money but rather that to make a good product for users a lot of relatively dull and tedious jobs are necessary. The incentives that motivate many/most OSS contributors don't tend to align with getting those things done, while commercial/proprietary organisations solve that problem by paying their developers as an incentive.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the ideas in OS X originated with NeXTSTEP, but it is definitely NOT NeXTSTEP, it is a descendant of NeXTSTEP.

Almost everything is different: the kernel, the driver model, the filesystem, the UI, the imaging model, the multimedia layer... aside from parts of the Cocoa frameworks, it's hard to find any NeXT at all in OS X.

Re:All projects need your help.

[Anonymous Coward]

We are converting to Linux on a major commercial system and multi million dollar program.

Re:All projects need your help.

[BasilBrush]

What Linux needs the most are a) advertising, and b) be the default OS of gray/white box machines.

I can suggest a slogan. "Like Windows, but Worse".

What desktop Linux always needed to attract users was a easy to use and consistent UI design. And it never got it. For all it's faults, Windows was easier for ordinary people to use.

SImply forcing it upon people by being the default install on cheap PCs won't work. We've already seen that with Netbooks. An initial period of Linux being the default install resulted in a ridiculously high return rate. So the manufacturers switched to using Windows for Netbooks.

The main problem with Linux is that it arrived too late. The core of Linux is just as good when not better than Windows' but it lacks 3rd party applications because... nobody uses Linux. It's a chicken and eggs problem.

OSX didn't arrive until 2000. It had a heritage of a handful of NeXTSTEP enthusiasts, and a niche of die-hard MacOS that didn't want to let go of MacOS 9. Yet it's done alright. It hasn't got anywhere near the market share of Windows, but it's got lots of the thing you say Linux is missing - third party apps.

It's advantages are that it has a good UI, and a user base that are willing to pay for software.

It's my party and no one else is invited

[TWiTfan]

the Linux Kernel development team in particular is known for its savagery

I've found that the "It's my party and no one else is invited" syndrome permeates all too many OSS projects. Finally stopped offering to help after encountering one too many projects that act like the snobby fraternity from a bad 80's movie. Now I do my own stuff and forgo the projects that have already started.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

I've found that the "It's my party and no one else is invited" syndrome permeates all too many OSS projects.

Pics or it didn't happen.

In other words, I've hear this a lot on the internet, but I've never seen it myself despite having contributed to numerous open projects. I expect that there are assholes out there running projects, but there are also plenty of assholes who wish to contribute as well.

I've even exchanged emails with Theo De Raadt himself and wasn't flamed. Actually, he was polite and helpful.

Finally stopped offering to help after encountering one too many projects that act like the snobby fraternity from a bad 80's movie.

I've never encountered a single project like that. However, I have encountered plenty of projects that don't want a large undocumented buggy code blob dumped on top of them, which internally partially reimplements a bunch of existing features badly.

I've been on all sides of this. I've been told that my code wasn't good enough, and needs to be fixed before being accepted. In some cases it was buggy, in others it wasn't in the house style. The latter sounds trivial, but if everyone invents their own way of doing the same thing, then the code gets to be an unmaintainable mess.

I've also been on the other end, telling people that their (sometimes) large contributions aren't up to snuff. Sometimes people take it well, but some people are simply incapable of taking criticism of their precious code.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Better still, use your programming talents to get a programming job you enjoy. Not only will they treat you more politely than an OSS project, they'll pay you.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Pics or it didn't happen. In other words, I've hear this a lot on the internet

Me too. And I've seen the nasty emails from Torvalds. Those are what you need, not pics.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

don't forget about the outright contempt and hatred for anything newbie. Pile the vitriol on the newbie who "asks a question he can find the answer to". Make them figure it all out for themselves and then berate them when the interwebs gives them the wrong answer.

God forbid one of you gurus actually mentor a newbie instead of grinding them under your heel.

Oh, and don't forget to make your code as undocumented, complex and unintelligible as possible using all the latest cool technologies that you just stayed up until 4am force feeding yourself -- while the rest of us have families. Just so you can lord over us all with your MAD skillz and treat us like crap when we don't understand it immediately.

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" -- I think somebody smart said that.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[jlechem]

Notepad++, the linunx kernel, I've seen some others.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[SuricouRaven]

And for those of us living in the real world?

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

Me too. And I've seen the nasty emails from Torvalds. Those are what you need, not pics.

So, where are the emails of Torvalds flaming TWiTfan? He claimed he was personally put off. And you reply as evidence that some completely unrelated random person was flamed by someone else entirely.

Righty ho.

Adding to that, he has a tendency to swear at other senior people who he thinks are making a mess. This is also very different from putting off beginners which is what this entire thread is about.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

FIlezilla.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

Notepad++, the linunx kernel, I've seen some others.

Really? You've seen TWiTfan been flamed off contributing to both Notepad++ and the Linux kernel? Interesting...

Being less facetious, I have no idea about Notepad++ (I use vim), and I've seen planty of flames from Torvalds towards well established kernel developers and people who like C++, but beginner?

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

Better still, use your programming talents to get a programming job you enjoy. Not only will they treat you more politely than an OSS project, they'll pay you.

It's a well known fact that the kernel developers employed by the likes of Redhat and IBM don't get paid. In fact it's a wonder they even have offices at all. Why not just stay in their parents basement, eh?

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Xest]

...and I've certainly seen it with PHP, Firefox, and MySQL.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[jones_supa]

Actually Notepad++ could use some simple GUI standardizing. For some reason the Help menu is "?", then there is an odd "MISC." tab in the Settings dialog and the centered "Close" button there too. The name of an untitled document is "new1" (with two spaces). Also the editor widget (Scintilla) does not honor Windows cursor blink rate preference. Purely aesthetic things, but these could all be fixed quite easily to make the application look more professional. Otherwise it's a nice text editor.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

So, where are the emails of Torvalds flaming TWiTfan? He claimed he was personally put off. And you reply as evidence that some completely unrelated random person was flamed by someone else entirely.

So what you are saying is while there's ample evidence of it happening to others, you're just calling TWiTfan a liar because you don't believe it happened to him.

I think you just became your own example.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

You think there aren't enjoyable programming jobs in the real world?

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem I have is usually just getting a response from developers/maintainers. Several times I've posted fixes for something or submitted patches for bugs which are simply ignored. I've probably contacted over a dozen open source projects in the past six years and offered to help with patches, documentation, taking over un-maintained branches of code and simply been ignored. I think that's almost worse than angry e-mails because it's hard to tell if the developers are ignoring the newcomer because they don't want the help or because they are lazy.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Chances of you landing a paid OSS job without first putting in years of unpaid work on the project. Pretty small. And in order to get those years, you've first got to get past the beginner hazing that TWiTfan was referring to.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

So what you are saying is while there's ample evidence of it happening to others, you're just calling TWiTfan a liar because you don't believe it happened to him.

So, I should just believe him outright about all these projects are behaving like 80's fraternities and he's done nothing to annoy them? That's not calling him a liar (though I am now calling you a fool for drawing such a comparison), I'm simply implying that his version of events is quite probably biased.

And yeah, I have seen lots of examples and they highlight several things. Firstly that context is missing and secondly that many people think it isn't the height of rudeness to waste the time of some of the best programmers in the world while simultaneously expecting an ego boost.

So yeah, I have interacted with many OSS developers even notoriously flamy ones and never been flamed. Because I am polite, respectful and cricually I treat their time as more important than my own, because to them it is.

And I've also seen many flames.

So yeah, I'm not going to believe that Mr Innocent wandered into an 80's frat and got flamed to death just like that.

So what you are saying is while there's ample evidence

Like what? Even with the notorious Linux ones there are reasonas why it's started and it's not just some random old boys 80's frat environment like th OP claimed.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

Chances of you landing a paid OSS job without first putting in years of unpaid work on the project.

Aaah so there are no TRUE scotsmen^Wpaid OSS developer jobs.

And in order to get those years, you've first got to get past the beginner hazing that TWiTfan was referring to.

That beginner hazing simply does not exist. You keep claiming it does. Put up or shut up: i.e. either back up you claims of this "it's my party"/hazing attitude or quit making stuff up.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

...and I've certainly seen it with PHP, Firefox, and MySQL.

Really?

So you've seen examples of this exact atitude:

I've found that the "It's my party and no one else is invited" syndrome permeates all too many OSS projects. Finally stopped offering to help after encountering one too many projects that act like the snobby fraternity from a bad 80's movie.

Allow me to restate: pics or it didn't happen.

IOW provide links or I'm not going to believe it, since I won't be able to see enough context to judge for myself.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

So yeah, I have interacted with many OSS developers even notoriously flamy ones and never been flamed. Because I am polite, respectful and cricually I treat their time as more important than my own, because to them it is.

And I've also seen many flames.

What's clearly coming across here is that you're an established frat-boy who knows the arcane rules and implied hierarchy already, and denies that hazing happens, whist admitting that it does happen to those that deserve it. After all, they must deserve it, otherwise they wouldn't be hazed.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

I have actually worked with dozens of open source projects. Most of them are happy to get help. There was one project that just told me to get lost. A few projects so inactive that there was no reply. A few who said "thanks, but no thanks", because the suggested changes were either not in line with their goals or considered so irrelevant that it was not worth doing the modifications.

So I would say that if you try to contribute into two projects and get bad experience from both, you are really unlucky fellow.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Aaah so there are no TRUE scotsmen^Wpaid OSS developer jobs.

Your problem there is that I never said there are no paid OSS developer jobs. So not my no true Scotsman, but your strawman.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Do you actually spend much time on 4chan, or are you just aspiring to be that kind of jackass?

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

Yay, I'm a frat boy.

Now I get to flame you: you're intentionally being disengenuous.

You very well know that flaming and hazing of newbies are completely different activities. You also very well know that flaming of people being idiots is entirely reasonable (you're being pretty rude to me now, for example).

But I'm not new here, and therefore I'm not going to make foolish claims that you're flaming n00bs on slashdot.

Now please either shut up or provide evidence of this flaming n00bs frat boy boys club behaviour.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

And I quote from you:

BasilBrush: Not only will they treat you more politely than an OSS project, they'll pay you.

You're claim that OSS projects won't pay you. I provided a couple of counter examples. You replied "aaah but they must have done a lot of unpaid work before that", something which indidentally you have no evidence for.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

Do you actually spend much time on 4chan, or are you just aspiring to be that kind of jackass?

Is 4chan the kind of place where people require some kind of evidence before believing random people on the internet making unsubstantiated claims?

Does this mean that you're now part of the "it's my party" frat boy network because you're flaming me (your claim, not mine).

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because being polite and considerate is obiviously as arcane as Elder Magick.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Blakey Rat]

My issue is projects that ask for the public to submit bug reports. But when the public does, they get either:

1) Completely ignored for years on end (1)

2) A snide, "if you want it fixed, fix it yourself" response.

3) A snide, pass-the-buck response. "That's not our bug, that's a bug in Java, tell them to fix it."

It's irritating. I've learned to never bother putting in bug reports, even if the project asks for them.

(1) Not even triaged in the worst cases-- Chromium, I'm looking at you. I finally got someone to look at it after 2 weeks by grabbing an email address off the bug tracker and nagging them to do so. By that time it'd turned out some dev has stealthily fixed it without even consulting the bug database first, apparently.

(2) Why do these projects ask for bug reports from the public if they don't want them? Just put up a message that says, "hey we don't WANT you to put in bugs, either write code or go away" and at least they'd be honest with their users.

(3) Yeah, well Java hasn't fixed it in 15 years, and there's an easy workaround you could apply, but if you're ok having shitty software because Oracle doesn't give a crap, I'll just use something else.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Xest]

That's okay, you don't have to believe it, I could frankly care less what you want to believe. What you believe is really of no consequence to me. However, the fact a few people have pointed it out individually (Basil Brush has me as a foe by the way, because we rarely agree on anything so I didn't exactly make the post I did in a show of brotherly kinship or something) should give you a hint that just because you refuse to believe it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I really have better things to do than spend hours scouring for old posts which I can barely even remember the month it happened let alone the day, but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Frankly though this attitude of yours highlights the problem to a degree - the people who have posted about it you've jumped on and tried to suppress the idea with "pics or it didn't happen" - the fact there are people like you who will refuse to acknowledge fault in their beloved clique is exactly why such fault in their beloved clique exists in the first place, because any asshole in the clique can be an asshole and they know they can count on people like you to flock to their defence, even when they're in the wrong. It's this sort of zealotry that enables the problem to exist.

I noticed in another post you mentioned you'd never seen that attitude towards beginners, but it's not simply about beginners, in fact, on the contrary in the examples I cited, what we had were experienced developers (outside of FOSS) offering suggestions or asking questions and being belittled over it with the net result being that, particularly in the PHP example that comes to mind, you had someone who clearly knew what they were on about being attacked by a bunch of devs that didn't, but because said devs were the oh-so-great (Hah!) developers of PHP and the other guy was some nameless person they were obviously correct and this highlights the sort of issue you've quoted, you get these cliques who assume they're the best in their fields, and when someone comes along who apparently knows better than them they get shot down because the clique can't deal with accepting honest well phrased constructive criticism and offers of help to fix said issues from someone outside the clique. It's too much of a dent to their overblown egos.

You most definitely see the issue with UX suggestions too (though I wont pretend it's a FOSS specific issue), there's often massive hostility from programmers to being told by artsy types how they should design parts of their application. I've even some outright say the UX should be kept complicated to keep "noobs" away from Linux and such, but how do you balance that with the same folks also wanting Linux to kill Windows and take over the desktop? They can't have it both ways.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? You've seen TWiTfan been flamed off contributing to both Notepad++ and the Linux kernel? Interesting...

oh my god..... what a miserable, pathetic, troll. grow up, mate.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Blakey Rat]

It draws fucking menus wrong. So does Audacity, BTW.

I need to find out where they got their UI widgets and slap whoever provided them... drop down menus aren't goddamned hard, they've been perfected for 30 years at this point.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[UnknownSoldier]

> I've found that the "It's my party and no one else is invited" syndrome permeates all too many OSS projects.

In contradistinction to closed source where you can't even fix bugs even if you wanted to?
And where they often don't provide any way to contact the team about bugs in the code, documentation, samples, etc.? /sarcasm Yeah, OSS sure has it "bad".

Now, _some_ OSS projects may have assholes, but at least I can read the source. The flaming "poster" boys Theo de Raadt and Linus Torvalds may _appear_ like jerks but I would rather they stand for something then fall for anything. At least they can _justify_ their opinions. There is nothing wrong with a healthy flame to get to the heart of the issue and put them ALL on the table.

The BIGGEST problem with OSS is lazy developers who can't even provide a fucking README.TO.COMPILE.TXT -- /me glares at you ZFSonLinux (fortunately it was easy enough to compile) ... There are many OSS projects that are too fucking complicated to even COMPILE. If I have to jump through hoops just to even compile the code I'm not going to waste my time trying to figure it out.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[hcs_$reboot]

the Linux Kernel development team in particular is known for its savagery

Considering the 1. high level of complexity and 2. high quality level of the Linux kernel, please keep him out of the regular OSS projects.
When the GIMP or LibreOffice bug (they do that often), I'm just annoyed. The Linux kernel OTOH cannot afford to bear a botched or newbie-made module.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Is 4chan the kind of place where people require some kind of evidence before believing random people on the internet making unsubstantiated claims?

No, its the kind of place where trolls say "pics or it didn't happen" then other trolls create a composite in photoshop. I don't know if they invented the phrase, but they certainly popularised it. Presumably you've never heard of goatse or GNAA and are unaware of where they originated. Guess.

Obviously NSFW, and not recommended at any other time either. Sticking hot knives in your eyes would be a preferable activity.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

But no matter how many people tell you they were badly treated by an OSS project, you're going to call them liars. Insisting that they give up their slashdot anonymity to give you examples

And why? Because you are one of the established OSS people that does the abuse of newcomers. And you're doing it again right here.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

get over yourselves, you are both bad people can we just agree to that and leave it alone

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

Frankly though this attitude of yours highlights the problem to a degree - the people who have posted about it you've jumped on and tried to suppress the idea with "pics or it didn't happen" - the fact there are people like you who will refuse to acknowledge fault in their beloved clique is exactly why such fault in their beloved clique exists in the first place, because any asshole in the clique can be an asshole and they know they can count on people like you to flock to their defence, even when they're in the wrong. It's this sort of zealotry that enables the problem to exist.

There are certainly faults, and I'm happy to identify them when they occur. The thing is one has to know where the fault lies. A lot of grief is caused by the out of project people acting badly as well, and when the project people get sufficiently annoyed, they get blamed.

Not to say there aren't "personalities" on both sides: there are and that's the problem. One story from a random person on slashdot merely informs me that at least one of the two people involved was unreasonable.

What you are advocating is that I go jumping all over the OSS community trying to bust cliques that I have no evidence for! That sort of thing is really bound to upset the original developers and would deservedly catch me many, many flames.

particularly in the PHP example that comes to mind, you had someone who clearly knew what they were on about being attacked by a bunch of devs that didn't, but because said devs were the oh-so-great (Hah!) developers of PHP

Yeah well OK, PHP is such a massive clusterfuck that I can well believe that the developers are permenantly on glue and would happily flame away. OK, I am being unfair there.

The thing is with a big project like that many of the suggestions are along the lines of "X sucks". A reply is often along the lines of (a) no it doesn't and it's been discussed at length before or (b) yes it does but we can't change it and it's been discussed at length before.

Not claiming that what you've seen is that, but that is not uncommon. I've seeen it lots. The poster could have read the FAQ or pervious forum posts, rather than necromancer a topic which has been hashed over repeatedly. I do not think it is too much to ask people to make some attempt to familiarise themselves with things before posting about them.

You most definitely see the issue with UX suggestions too (though I wont pretend it's a FOSS specific issue), there's often massive hostility from programmers to being told by artsy types how they should design parts of their application.

Oh yes, there certainly is. The trouble is that half of the suggestions (ex GIMP) are "make it work like photoshop". The trouble is that many of the non-artsy people developing and using it haven't used photoshop, so merely having familiarity of that interface is of no benefit. In fact changing it would simply slow them all down. Also, the whole MDI thing was because the GIMP developers were all using sensible window managers and were being repeatedly asked to correct flaws in someone else's software. The sensible solution was of course either to stop using bad window managers, or complain to the makers of those.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

You think your campus and/or Moms basement is the real world?

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, I've hear this a lot on the internet, but I've never seen it myself despite having contributed to numerous open projects. I expect that there are assholes out there running projects, but there are also plenty of assholes who wish to contribute as well.

I hear the same thing about trying to get help with Linux as a user, but I've never experienced that, either, no matter what forum. I think you hit the nail on the head with "plenty of assholes who wish to contribute."

Closed source people are used to being able to be rude to tech support and are usually pissed off when they call. That's not how the open source world works. In the open source world, a "Hello, sorry but I'm new at this but I'm stumped, could you please tell me how to..." will, in my experience, almost always result in your problem being solved. In the closed source world that's likely to to get your problem ignored until they get the asshole on the other line off their backs.

In the open source world, "This app is fucking garbage, how can I get this piece of shit to..." will get you ignored or flamed. If you want my help and you're not paying me for it, you're an idiot to expect me to help you if you're going to abuse me.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

But no matter how many people tell you they were badly treated by an OSS project, you're going to call them liars.

No, I'm happy to tell them that their feelings on the matter do not adequately represent reality as far as I am concerned. You're the one who keeps bringing up the term "liar", not me.

Insisting that they give up their slashdot anonymity to give you examples

I've been told by people like you that examples abound and are easy to find. Find one not involving you, then.

And why? Because you are one of the established OSS people that does the abuse of newcomers. And you're doing it again right here.

You're such a n00b with your ID almost identical to mine. You've only been here 10 years n00b.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

No, its the kind of place where trolls say "pics or it didn't happen" then other trolls create a composite in photoshop. I don't know if they invented the phrase, but they certainly popularised it. Presumably you've never heard of goatse or GNAA and are unaware of where they originated. Guess.

Good to see you can answer a rhetorical question.

"Pics or it didn't happen" is meme-ese for "I'm not going to believe you without evidence". IOW [citation needed]

I mean FFS, if there's so much evidence of such vile behaviour then find some and show me. It can't be that hard if it's as common as you claim.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

1) Completely ignored for years on end (1)

I agree with that one. I've had reported bugs go unanswered forever on some projects.

2) A snide, "if you want it fixed, fix it yourself" response.

I don't think I've ever seen that from a project which actually asks for bug reports. The only reports I've made in person have either been ignored or dealt with.

3) A snide, pass-the-buck response. "That's not our bug, that's a bug in Java, tell them to fix it."

You know sometimes there are bugs in other projects. Example: your program segfaults with this AVI. After investigation, so does anything built with FFMPEG, indicating it might be a problem with FFMPEG

If that happens you'll get a pass the buck response probably because hardly anyone knows enough about the internals of FFMPEG to go about fixing that bug.

In such cases, what would you have the author of the software do?

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[jlechem]

I still use it but I've submitted many bugs and feature requests since version 5.X something and they're still not fixed. I offered to fix them since I've been doing win32/MFC for 15 years and nothing. If it weren't so mature already I'd ditch it in a heartbeat.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

BasilBrush: Not only will they treat you more politely than an OSS project, they'll pay you.

You're claim that OSS projects won't pay you.

English comprehension and logic aren't your strong points then. My sentence points out that a job will pay you. Implicit is that they'll pay you from day one. It doesn't say that there are no paid jobs that are doing OSS projects.

The fact is this is about newcomers to an OSS project being treated badly by those in the clique. Those in the clique might have paid jobs doing the OOS project. Those who are new would take years to get there, but more likely never will. The vast majority doing this stuff being unpaid. Those that are, mostly got in to the project early. And they aren't going to step aside to make room. Anyone going in to OSS thinking they're going to be paid eventually might just as well join a Ponzi scheme.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[internerdj]

I sat in a cube with an intern early in my career. He would stay up all night contributing to Asterisk. He apparently did well enough contributing to make good friends with Mark Spencer. He ended up showing up later and later to work and was eventually fired for his unprofessionalism. He was hired at Digium almost immediately. I'm not sure how long it lasted but there are some jobs out there working OSS development and there are OSS contribution paths to get there.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

My sentence points out that a job will pay you. Implicit is that they'll pay you from day one.

You also implicitly point out that won't happen with OSS jobs. If you get employed by IBM, ARM, RedHat, heck even Oracle's open teams they will pay you from day 1 to work on open projects.

That's the way a job works. You do it, they pay you.

You are trying to insinuate that this is not the case with OSS jobs. That is not true.

Those that are, mostly got in to the project early.

ARM hires new people all the time to work on Linux stuff.

Anyone going in to OSS thinking they're going to be paid eventually

WTF does that even mean? "going into OSS"?

If you take a job in OSS you will get paid, it's sort of the definition of a job. If you do it in your spare time, you won't. That's kinda the definition of spare time.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

You also implicitly point out that won't happen with OSS jobs. If you get employed by IBM, ARM, RedHat, heck even Oracle's open teams they will pay you from day 1 to work on open projects.

You are saying that someone who hasn't already had years working on an OSS project will get a paid job with one of those companies.

Pics or it didn't happen.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha. You're screwed.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Right. So that's an example of what I was describing of people doing years of unpaid work on OSS before they get a paid one.

Suppose people who wanted to work on Windows had to spend years of unpaid work contributing code to Windows before Microsoft would give them a paid job. There'd rightly be an uproar! They'd be called all kinds of evil. Not praised for at least paying a small minority of their programmers.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

You are saying that someone who hasn't already had years working on an OSS project will get a paid job with one of those companies.

Yes, yes I am.

I know people who got a job with Arm straight out of an integrated 4 year Engineering Masters degree. Oddly enought for competitive jobs they only hire people who have proven themselves while students.

Pics or it didn't happen.

Well, ARM clearly does hire graduates straight from university, here:

http://www.arm.com/about/careers/graduates/recruitment-events.php

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Well, ARM clearly does hire graduates straight from university, here:

a) ARM doe an awful lot of things that are not OSS. They are a chip design company.

b) Being a graduate from university does not say that you haven't been contributing to OSS for free for years. In fact quite a lot of OSS work is done by students.

So, pics or it didn't happen. I mean FFS, if there's so much evidence of OSS jobs going to OSS newbs then find some and show me. It can't be that hard if it's as common as you claim.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

a) ARM doe an awful lot of things that are not OSS. They are a chip design company.

Chip design is very specialised. They higher a lot of programmers soo.

b) Being a graduate from university does not say that you haven't been contributing to OSS for free for years. In fact quite a lot of OSS work is done by students.

Well if you want to count university as years of unpaid work then go ahead. You may also be surprised to learn that for getting good jobs in any company (Google, Microsoft, etc) having a track record helps.

So, pics or it didn't happen. I mean FFS, if there's so much evidence of OSS jobs going to OSS newbs then find some and show me. It can't be that hard if it's as common as you claim.

I invited that from you first, so: after you.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[mishehu]

I felt like chiming in here a bit, as I think I understand what serviscope_minor is getting at. I too have contributed to several projects - whether it be documentation, fixes to code, or enhancements (most recently I added some functionality to FreeSWITCH's mod_curl. I've been down this path before, but I'm also experienced enough in life and professionally to see things for what they really are. Most of the time, you'll be told that your implementation is wrong and needs to be changed, or can it be done a different way, the idea is not good, or they don't like your edits. Now there's two possible responses that you, the contributor, can give:

1) You can cry because somebody was blunt and/or curt with you about your contributions, and take your ball and go home.

OR

2) You can avoid taking the criticism personally. From my experience, there are almost always very good reasons for this criticism. Just because you are providing volunteer work doesn't mean that the project in question is required to accept your contribution. You are either just trying to contribute what they don't need or don't want, or you are contributing something they do want but you need to do it in a different way so it fits better with the vision of the project.

BasilBrush - This is why he is asking for TWiTfan to provide the context. The context is all important - did TWiTfan choose 1 or 2 above? Do we agree that his choice to do one or the other was a good thing or a case of overly thin skin and too easily bruised of an ego? This isn't about 80's frats. This is simply about the cruel nature of the world: the vast majority of the time people only care about what you can provide to them, and if you can't provide anything, then scram.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I think the post is believable and certainly comports with what I've seen,. Abusive, assholes in power positions ruin projects all the time. I don't think to screen swipe my exchanges with assholes because I don't feel the need to *prove* anything to someone else. People take me at my word and my word is good. You're trying to issue some requirement on everyone else for believability. Pics or it didn't happen is OK for nuclear arms verification treaties. People sharing their personal experiences in an online forum? Uh,... no./

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

That's okay, you don't have to believe it, I could frankly care less what you want to believe.

Ah, so you do care some?

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

I've even exchanged emails with Theo De Raadt himself and wasn't flamed. Actually, he was polite and helpful.

Pics or it didn't happen.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Well if you want to count university as years of unpaid work then go ahead.

See the difference in pay between interning for a commercial software company and an OSS project.

I invited that from you first, so: after you.

You say that now. After your attempt to find any evidence for your claim failed.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[TWiTfan]

Pics or it didn't happen.

Okay.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[FatLittleMonkey]

I've read your comments in this thread and it is obvious that you are precisely the person everyone who has had difficulties with OSS projects is complaining about.

You've got a bunch of people who've had negative experiences and instead of listening to their experiences, instead of asking questions or adding thoughts that create an interesting and informative thread, your only interest is in proving that they are wrong. You twist their words, you pick and snipe, you grind them down until you drive them out of the thread and you "win"!

And that is a perfect example of what people face when dealing with... well, you, in OSS projects. I'd be willing to bet good money that you do exactly the same thing in help or dev forums for projects you think you're assisting. Grinding people down until they give up and leave. You do vastly more harm than good, as you have done in this very thread. I suspect it takes a dozen good contributors to make up for every one of... you. So in effect, you are not only harming newcomers, but you are cancelling out the work of many other existing contributors. Even worse if it creates a culture that encourages the same behaviour in others because of the habits they learn when trying to deal with people like you; until they become people like you. An anti-social virus.

While I know you can't read this comment (I mean actually "read" it, I'm sure you'll see some keywords to pick apart), I don't really write it for you. I'm hoping that it helps others who might recognise your behaviour in themselves and others, help them understand why what you do is so destructive. And perhaps create just a little social pressure in the other direction.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

He explained all of that in one post - he said he is a Frat Boy. Everything you describe, the defensiveness, the asshole-ism is explained by the fact that he is a Frat Boy...in other words an academic gang-banger or white collar union member.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

But then there is the other side.

I submitted a bug on nettop (building on solaris+sparc), and I had an immediate response from the lead dev. He sent me a series of patches, I tested, and within a couple days we had things working properly. Try that with _any_ commercial entity.

I find a lot of ignored bug reports are _bad_ bug reports. You need to describe the problem, provide information on reproducing (if possible), and stick around and do your part to help the fix along.

Even just a stupid user question of mine on the Postfix mailing list was answered by Wietse himself, on the same day it was asked. Again, try to get the lead engineer at some commercial project to give you the time of day.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anomalyst]

what would you have the author of the software do?

What any competent maintainer would do. determine the parameter(s) value that induces the fault and code a workaround that wards that function call from those values, throw an assertion to get a better handle on what the root cause is, which would probably help the FFMPEG track down the issue if it is in their code. Its as likely that an unitialized value in the calling code is the culprit as something in FFMPEG internals. Grat rule of thumb, initalice EVERY variable when you declare it, let the compiler optimize it out as needed. turn on the uninitialized variable compiler warning explicitly. Dont rely on the default

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[jgrahn]

What's clearly coming across here is that you're an established frat-boy who knows the arcane rules and implied hierarchy already

Politeness and respect when asking favors from people who don't know you, that's arcane rules these days? Wow ...

I'm with the grandparent. People claiming "I was badly treated by an OSS project" without even naming the project are at least as likely to have been the one who were at fault themselves. That also goes for "I was once badly treated by a Wikipedia editor" people.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

Man you really are a piece of work. Reading this thread makes my skin crawl. You must be a really unpleasant dude in real life.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure I understand this comment. I've worked as a software engineer for nearly 20 years now, Off the top of my head, I think I've had 3 unenjoyable and 5 enjoyable gigs. Really can't complain. I love this industry,

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

Politeness and respect when asking favors from people who don't know you, that's arcane rules these days? Wow ...

No, it's pathetic shit like this:

>
> On 01/06/2013 11:10 AM, Basil Chupin wrote:
>> On 06/01/13 08:19, Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
>>> On Sat, 5 Jan 2013 12:43:15 PM Gene Heskett wrote:
>>>> Go away, this list doesn't need you.
>>> Gene, you are the problem here.
>>
>> I don't think so.
>>
>> Those who top post are the problem here.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Xest]

Whoever modded you troll is a dick. It's a heated topic and whilst I don't agree with you 100% on it you stayed respectful and didn't deserve it.

Moderators who moderate politically need to die.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Xest]

I don't think that saying means what you think it means. If you interpret it literally rather than recognise it for what it is - a phrase intended sarcastically, then you're bound to come out with the wrong interpretation.

Depending on where you're from you may file your mistake under either cultural differences in phrases or alternatively just plain ignorance.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

It's a heated topic and whilst I don't agree with you 100% on it you stayed respectful and didn't deserve it.

Thankyou.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

What any competent maintainer would do. determine the parameter(s) value that induces the fault and code a workaround that wards that function call from those values,

No. 1000% no, not with something as complex as FFMPEG. Basically in order to understand enough about the container and codec to figure out what parameter is bad and implement a workaround, you'd basically have to reimplement a substantial fraction of ffmpeg.

Basically you hand it a file and it gives you back frames of bytes.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

You say that now.

Um yeah?

I asked you for some evidence of your claims ages ago. You were unable to provide any. I'm not going to run around in circles at your beck and call when you are clearly too lazy to engage in the debate properly yourself.

Your information should be very easy to find: much FOSS software is developed in the open, so public examples should abound.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[serviscope_minor]

I've read your comments in this thread and it is obvious that you are precisely the person everyone who has had difficulties with OSS projects is complaining about.

What would you have me do?

I could sit here and wring my hands in anguish at the injustice of the world.

Or, I could actually go out there and do something about it. I'm, sure as hell not going to do the latter without knowing who was the perpetrator and whether they really were the perpetrator.

I've been around the OSS world a while now. I've seen assholeishness on both sides. It's now at the point where I won't believe someone I do not know over claims of rudeness and mistreatment because AFAICT there is a 50/50 chance that the complainer was the asshole.

I have a pseudonymous account on slashdot so I can vent my opinions frankly. You can believe what you want about me, but on OSS projects, I use my real name and I do not flame people.

I'm arguing here (or grinding people down as you like to put it), because there seem to be a lot of wrongheadded opinions in this post. Slashdot is not exactly free from forthright, abrasive people. Do you really believe that every single one of them was the abused innocent?

If so, I have a bridge to sell you. Used, but with one careful owner.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[BasilBrush]

Face it, you overreached in trying to make working on OSS look like a good option. You have to do it for love, because the chances of getting money for it are tiny. And if you're a beginner getting in now rather than early, non-existant. Like a Ponzi scheme.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Anonymous Coward]

Xest, you fucking idiot. Do you have any idea who you're dealing with? This motherfucker is a troll and you just kissed his ass.

Re:It's my party and no one else is invited

[Xest]

If he is then fine - mod the post he trolled in troll, but the particular post in response to me was absolutely not a troll. It was reasoned and decently written so like it or not that post was not deserving of a troll mod.

You can call it "kissing his ass" if you want but it's far better to encourage posts that are reasoned by not modding them troll and mod ones that are trolling troll rather than just arbitrarily mod any post troll otherwise what incentive has he got to do anything other than troll if he's going to get modded that way regardless?

This is the problem with Slashdot, it's mob justice with no rationality, people mod politically and when it goes down that route there's no point having any intelligent or insightful debate, you might as well just troll and troll because no matter how you behave you'll get modded the same by politically motivated fuckwads.

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Newbie: Hi! I have a set of ideas for improving the Linux memory manager which I've laid out in this mail.

Linus: #k$^!@s!!

Ulrich: ^$#&!&*!!!!!

Newbie: Wait a minute. I thought this was the place for kernel discussions.

Linus: Oh sorry.... this is abuse.

Re:Obligatory

[real-modo]

Newbie: Hi! I have a set of ideas for improving the Linux memory manager which I've laid out in this mail.

Linus: #k$^!@s!!

Ulrich: ^$#&!&*!!!!!

While excessively abrupt by Anglophone standards and not constructive, Linus's and Ulrich's responses are correct in spirit.

Unfortunately, ideas have negative value until proven otherwise. Here's what the newbie should say:

"I've been working on some tweaks to the memory manager which may be useful to others. In most circumstances they provide an performance improvement of X%; in these cases [here listed], it's Y%.

"Here are A-B performance comparisons for 1-core and multi-core ARM, for desktop x86, and for 24-core Opteron-based servers under these (small, medium, large) memory configurations for these (standard) workloads:- ...."

Any fool can have ideas, and most do. Having workable ideas, and demonstrating that they work, separates you from the herd.

How about contribute to something you can add valu

[gl4ss]

How about contribute to something you can add value to? like, not treating it like contributing just something to just any project has absolute value that you can then put on your CV.

So look at software you use - fix some bugs that annoy you and contribute fixes or create new features that you would find useful in the software. that's how almost all successful small open source projects operate. which is pretty much how the example guy on the article went about it. contributing to software you don't use is going to be a mess.

if you have a truly novel fix or improvement to the linux kernel, you could always present it at as well. that's contributing even if you don't get your commit in, if it's a good solution to some known problem then people will take notice. because if you feel like that your changes wouldn't be appreciated, you could always just release a fork.

just answering questions on stackoverflow etc can greatly help some projects too.

The Kernel community isn't as bad as you think

[Anonymous Coward]

My fist ever contribution to an open source project was a silly little patch for the Kernel. While there was some initial indifference on the mailing list, I received actionable feedback. I iterated a couple of times, times, fixed issues that were called out and got my pulled in. All without any 'savage' name calling, flaming or . True, there are more than a few grumpy Kernel hackers, just are also loads of folks willing to help out newbies. You know, like in ANY opensource project. Hell, there's a website and a mailing list just for newbies! I really don't understand why Linux gets so much hate. Especially considering that it is the LARGEST, most successful open source project ever?

Re:The Kernel community isn't as bad as you think

[Chrisq]

I really don't understand why Linux gets so much hate. Especially considering that it is the LARGEST, most successful open source project ever?

I think it is because Linus himself has a reputation. As you say though, on a large project there must be plenty of helpful people too.

Re:The Kernel community isn't as bad as you think

[VortexCortex]

Meh, on average they're glad to help folk get their one token patch into the Kernel. I take everything Linus says with a grain of salt. That's just the way he communicates: It's harsh, but you have to take offense yourself. He doesn't care if people are offended. He's also equally as harsh to himself, readily calling himself an idiot (especially his past self). Why, I even remember the time he wrote that if he ever revved the Kernel beyond the 2.x.x series to 3.x.x it would mean he'd gone bat-shit insane and rewritten the whole thing in VB... Salt. Take some. Chill.

Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla offers a lot of help to those who wish to contribute. I was quite pleasantly surprised with how smooth the process for contributing to firefox was.

Re: I cringe whenever I see this name

[Anonymous Coward]

"Did you no tell them they were the Lard's Chips?"

Github makes it easy.

[mwvdlee]

1) Get a github account.
2a) Submit a bug.
2b) Request a new feature.
2c) Fix a bug.
2d) Research and comment on an open issue.
2e) Add a new feature.
2f) Fix typos in documentation.
2g) Add documentation.
2h) Add a translation for your own language.
2i) Add a new theme/template.
2j) Make the project page nicer to look at.
2k) Thank the authors.
2l) ???
3) Profit!

Getting involved starts simply with making "first contact".
Any half-decent project team will gracefully accept anything you have to offer and pretty soon you'll find you have quite a lot to offer.

Re:Github makes it easy.

[kthreadd]

Just be aware that most repositories on GitHub are actual closed source all rights reserved proprietary [1], so unless you check specifically you might accidentally contribute to non-free software.

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/github-needs-take-open-source-seriously-208046

Re:Github makes it easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

this needs to be modded up

Re:Github makes it easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! That's really good advice. Thanks for posting that.

Like space games?

[Smivs]

Try Oolite. A free, cross-platform space game based on the classic Elite. Dead easy to get into and a great community behind it.

Re:Like space games?

[BasilBrush]

Is that not finished yet? It only took two people a couple of years to write the original.

Re:Like space games?

[drinkypoo]

It works fine, but it makes no real improvements over the original in terms of the game itself. Primitive economy etc etc. It could use a boost.

Re:Like space games?

[gl4ss]

It works fine, but it makes no real improvements over the original in terms of the game itself. Primitive economy etc etc. It could use a boost.

but in that case you could just go with something else than oolite. I wasn't aware that it aspired to be anything else than elite.

there's some weird elite projects out there, like for ffe a project that took the original executables, tore them apart and added opengl graphics. not exactly open source but cool as hell.

Re:Like space games?

[drinkypoo]

but in that case you could just go with something else than oolite. I wasn't aware that it aspired to be anything else than elite.

But then, why not just play elite? I mean, it's around, you don't have to pay for it, why not play elite?

If anyone is aware of an elite-like game with a true functional economy where actions have consequences, I'd really like to play it. But I want it to be a single-player game, because I so often have marginal internet access, and I don't want to pay a monthly fee. That leaves out Eve.

Re:Like space games?

[BasilBrush]

I'm with you drinkypoo. I was a great fan of Elite back in the day. And actually believed there were economic consequences to what I chose to buy. And that there were missions to go on, meteor storms to find, and something exciting in the other galaxies, if only I could get the powerup I needed to get there.

(On my version (BBC cassette) there were none of these things. Only there was no way of knowing that in those pre-www days.)

One's imagination and hopefulness filled in the gaps.

But we're older, wiser and have experienced more sophisticated games since then. I feel sure there is a good game to be made in this genre, but neither David Braben nor the community efforts have succeeded in the last 30 years. Who knows maybe Braben's up-coming remake will hit the mark. Never say never.

Re:Like space games?

[kermidge]

If I understand correctly from the website, forums, and discussions elsewhere, Oolite is open-ended itself, rather than just the gameplay being open-ended as in Elite and many of its versions, sequels, and spin-offs. So it's more of a process and a project as it is a finished product.

From what I saw, the few times I've visited, the community is small, thriving, and goes through spurts of development and testing, with slack periods in between. In its own way both the game and its development is about as magical as the Elite I played on my Atari ST back when.

Since no one reads articles

[Jmc23]

Everyone will post their 2 cents worth, recreating the article in a hodge-podge way.

Re:Since no one reads articles

[VortexCortex]

Correction: We've forked the article and have re-implemented the parts that were not, in fact, invented here.

Game tip

[jones_supa]

I heard that FreeRCT is in need for both programmers and graphic artists. Their goal is to create an open game in the spirit of Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 & 2.

Re:Game tip

[geek]

I heard that FreeRCT is in need for both programmers and graphic artists. Their goal is to create an open game in the spirit of Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 & 2.

I actually thought about contributing until I saw "C++" in their requirements. :)

Re:Game tip

[phantomfive]

Most games use C++ FWIW, but anyway I'm with you, I wouldn't use C++ for a game either.

Re:Game tip

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, why use an efficient language when you can use something with a bulky runtime like Java or Ruby! Hip programmer coddling over performance!

OpenHatch

[BrianShannon]

OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools, and education.

http://openhatch.org/

Very useful for beginners.
http://openhatch.org/search/?q=&toughness=bitesize
http://openhatch.org/search/?q=&contribution_type=documentation&toughness=bitesize

Wine

[Anonymous Coward]

I was pretty big into fixing bugs and hacking Wine until I got turned off by a Codeweavers dev who refused to help with a bug that I had patched. His code was an admitted "hack" that made some other software work for him but breaks mine. I gave up on it shortly after that. It's also why I refuse to buy Crossover.

Re:Wine

[kermidge]

I'm sorry to hear of your experience, and dismayed by the situation you describe. Yet, I use Crossover to run Steam, to run Civ V and Silent Hunter IV. I had Civ running fine under Wine, then screwed something up and at the time was never able to get it running correctly again (haven't given it a go recently), which is what led me to CodeWeavers. It's difficult for me to come up with the money for it but since, if I understand correctly, improvements in Crossover go directly into Wine, I figure it's worth it.

wrong points

[Tom]

Uh, this one is really simple.

Don't start at the kernel, idiot.
Don't start at a compiler or programming language or other system part, fool.

Start with an application. In fact, if you need to get that explained, you should start with a good book.

The kernel and compiler, etc. people ought to be hostile to newbies. Their goal is not to teach newbies, it's to deliver reliable code. You don't start learning to fly with a Boing 747 full of passengers, you start with a simulator or a Cessna.

Your first contributions shouldn't be in anything that other (applications) rely on. It should be in an application. Something where if it fails only that thing fails and not everything that depends on it. You'll find that the maintainers of these applications are more forgiving, simply because the burden on them is a lot less.

And yes, I say that as someone who has contributed to bunches of projects.

Re:wrong points

[hyades1]

"And yes, I say that as someone who has contributed to bunches of projects".

Like we didn't already know that from the tone of your comment. It does, though, go a long way toward explaining the overwhelming success of the Linux-based desktop environment.

Re:wrong points

[Anonymous Coward]

It does, though, go a long way toward explaining the overwhelming success of the Linux-based desktop environment.

Because the more successful ones let n00bs contribute code?

Re:wrong points

[BasilBrush]

Because the more successful ones let n00bs contribute code?

The more successful ones don't let programmers run the show. Good programmers tend to be awful managers.

Re:wrong points

[drinkypoo]

Like we didn't already know that from the tone of your comment. It does, though, go a long way toward explaining the overwhelming success of the Linux-based desktop environment.

It does, though, go a long way toward explaining the excellent utility and stability of the Linux kernel.

Not everyone shares your goals. I want stability more than shinies.

You can get a minor kernel patch in without a lot of experience, as others in this thread have done. A major kernel patch should come with a lot of scrutiny.

Re:wrong points

[Anonymous Coward]

The article isn't complaining about people being hostile to newbies, it's written to try to warn newbies and steer them towards places where their contributions will be more welcome. Basically, the article has the same intended effect as your comment, but is written in a way that is actually effective. In contrast, your comment is very likely to turn off the intended audience on account of how obnoxious you are.

Re:wrong points

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't start learning to fly with a Boing 747 full of passengers, you start with a simulator or a Cessna.

Someone hasn't seen the new training standardisation from ICAO driven by air lines... cheaper to skip straight to the point? Then let's do it! Who needs hours right?

Re:wrong points

[Anonymous Coward]

The more successful ones don't let programmers run the show.

Such as?

Re:wrong points

[Anonymous Coward]

BULLSHIT

Being a good programmer does NOT equate to being an awful manager.

Good try though,

Re:wrong points

[Tom]

Then together, we will reach everyone. Not everyone gets it by getting it nicely pointed out to them. Sometimes, the clue bat is a necessity.

Re:wrong points

[Tom]

Stupid questions deserve stupid answers. Being a newbie in a field is not an excuse to wasting the experts time by asking the same question for the 50th time or making the same mistake for the 100th.

Go to cryptography experts and tell them you've invented a new cypher and it's really great and could they please have a look. If you are lucky, you will get a few flames telling them that you're the 10th person this month and all the others have been idiots. Not just this month, but for the past 10 years.

Some newbie coming into a field that requires expertise and delivering something that is not a total waste of time to everyone is a once-in-a-decade event. It just happened in mathematics, so yes, it does happen. If you think you're that event, chances are stacked against you solidly.

That doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means you have a lot to learn, including the nature of the field. And all the hostility and flaming and being obnoxious actually serves a purpose: To shut down the crap as quickly and efficiently as possible, in order to minimize the waste of time.

That's the price you pay for an open development model where everyone can come in and talk to the dev people directly with almost no barriers. Other fields have solved the problem by creating barriers. Try to discuss quantum physics with Hawkins. You'll find that you need to prove several times that you really have something worth discussing just to get there.

In Free Software development, we don't have that barrier. But that means the top people have to deal with the Sturgeon's Law stuff themselves, and they need to do it quickly, and that means skipping the niceties and telling things as they are.

Re:wrong points

[Matt_Bennett]

In mathematical terms, technical proficiency is orthogonal to managerial proficiency.

Re:wrong points

[FatLittleMonkey]

Being a newbie in a field

Your whole argument is based on this assumption. An assumption neither in the original article nor summary, only in the title. "Beginner" meant "a newbie to OSS" not "a newbie to software development". And your response is exactly what people complain about. You interpreted the topic in a way that allowed you to dismiss the whole discussion without having to think about it.

Try to discuss quantum physics with Hawkins.

Hawking? Hawkins died in 1928. [See, annoying, isn't it.]

Re:wrong points

[excelsior_gr]

I agree with what you say, and I have respect towards your low-number UID. However:
You might want to cut the kids some slack now and then. Here's my own anecdote: When I was still a student, I once went to a Professor and asked him to have a look at my code, because I wanted it to run faster. I told him I have written an equation parser in Fortran. Instead, he tried to explain that this could not be done, while I could only insist that it could be done, since I had already done it. I had the code in a diskette, and he only had to take a look. Hell, he had wasted enough time arguing with me already. At the end he sent me to a grad student to take a look at my code, who was totally uninterested and just copied my files on his disk. I never heard of them since.
Now, my parser was definitely not optimum (that's why I was there in the first place) and I'm definitely not the best Fortran programmer. This is not my point. My point is: Treating people with arrogance is not the best barrier for minimizing your waste of time. Of course, my example is not an exact analogy: the professor was there to teach me (which he pretty straightforwardly refused to do); you are not there to teach newbies. Nevertheless, who says that you can't also, like Hawkins, have stages for reaching the top-notch gurus? Have a separate email list, dedicated to sieve the newbies out. The ones that make it though will be worth the effort.

Re:wrong points

[dmullenaux]

Uh, this one is really simple.

Don't start at the kernel, idiot. Don't start at a compiler or programming language or other system part, fool.

I think some people might be getting lost in what the real problem might be. Your post is spot on, people starting out shouldn't be messing with projects that technical or important. Your delivery however is, in my opinion, the problem. A kid right out of college looking for a place to start helping could be told a lot better than, hey idiot, get lost, in response to a request. That kind of attitude wouldn't fly in a corporate environment, but it has been pretty common in this thread. Civility and understanding can go a long way and do a lot of good to help, even if the answer is no thank you, or not right now.

Re:wrong points

[hyades1]

Thanks for demonstrating a level of understanding that is, sadly, rare in the community we're discussing. It's difficult not to think in terms of nasty little smart-asses who have one field where expertise grants them authority, and they use it to pay back all the frustrations and disappointments they accumulate in other areas of their life.

Re:wrong points

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid questions deserve stupid answers.

Fortunately, we have you hear to give the stupid answers.

Re:wrong points

[Tom]

You might want to cut the kids some slack now and then.

Not if I'm the Linux kernel maintainer, say. Its is not my job to teach the youngsters. It is my job to maintain the code base. Anything that distracts from that is just that - a distraction.

In your example, you went to your professor - someone whose job it is to teach you. But you already noticed that important difference yourself.

Nevertheless, who says that you can't also, like Hawkins, have stages for reaching the top-notch gurus?

Two reasons.
One, it is considered not cool.
Two, it adds administrative overhead of a kind nobody wants to do on a volunteer basis.

I've run a couple projects. Everyone wants to do the cool stuff, dabble with the code. Very few people want to be the community managers, project managers (unless it gives authority on decisions!), maintain the wiki or such things.

In the case of Hawkins, the layers you have to go through are doing their job that they are being paid for. Never forget that difference. You can do a ton of stuff in commercial projects that you just can't do in volunteer projects.

Re:wrong points

[Tom]

Your whole argument is based on this assumption.

Simply put: Yes, and the burden of proof is on you (or the submitter). That exactly is the point. Yes, as in every filter, there are false positives and false negatives. Sometimes a potentially great contributor is turned away. You can't judge everything based on one data point, though. You have to take into consideration the many times that the same level of hostility prevented waste of time and then judge the sum of all events, not the one false positive.

Hawking? Hawkins died in 1928. [See, annoying, isn't it.]

Uh, no? Why should I consider it annoying if you rightly point out a mistake?

Re:wrong points

[Tom]

As I explained in a different answer: The hostility actually serves a purpose. That and most geeks lack social skills.

So basically you can either have these bright people doing stuff for free that you would pay a huge amount of money for if they didn't, and accept that they can be obnoxious and hostile, or you can buy your webserver from a corporate entity that pays people to be friendly.

Sometimes you get bright people who are also very nice to be around. But when it comes to getting a core system coded and maintained, I'll take the obnoxious asshole who knows what the fuck he's doing over the friendly bloke who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag any day.

I mean, if I can get a friendly guy who's also a coding genius, I'll take him. But if not, I'd rather take the genius part than the friendly part.

Deuces and Quickies

[morrison]

The BRL-CAD project defines two levels of tasks geared towards new contributors. "Deuces" are small tasks expected to take less than 2 hours. "Quickies" take around 2 days:

http://brlcad.org/wiki/Deuces
http://brlcad.org/wiki/Quickies

The project even provides a virtual machine disk image that has everything set up and ready to go.

Re:Deuces and Quickies

[Bob the Super Hamste]

The project even provides a virtual machine disk image that has everything set up and ready to go.

That is a pretty sweet idea for lowering the barrier to entry more projects should do that. I have tried a few times to get a dev environment set up for one eclipse based project and it always turns into a giant mess shortly there after as the documentation is so out of date that setting things up to work with the current version of the software just fails.

I Won't Even Bother Filing Bug Reports Any More

[Anonymous Coward]

After being savaged for filing perfectly valid and well-stated bug reports at three different OSS projects, I've given up ever providing reports to any of them. They take a bug report as a personal attack, and lash back at you; sometimes in an extremely pithy manner.

I run my own FOSS project, and have taken to heart the lessons that I've learned dealing with those brats.

As a result, I get plenty of help keeping my project at an almost unbelievable quality level. It often requires back-and-forth with the reporter, and, yes, they are often stunningly naive, and yes, sometimes, they start off rude, but responding in a measured, kind, understanding manner has had tremendous benefits.

Just my experience. YMMV.

Here's a better pick

[dottrap]

Instead of those arbitrary picks, how about looking at Google Summer of Code?

Those projects have conveniently listed what things they want help on and already have allocated mentors to lead those projects.

While you might not be a student, if you really want to help out, I bet most of those projects would welcome additional involvement and the mentors would be willing to talk with you if you are serious about helping.

Re:OpenHatch and CommunityCorps

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the link. I hadn't heard of them yet. I've also seen this site. I haven't used either of them yet to know how well they work.
http://thecommunitycorps.org

This is the problem with OSS...

[erp_consultant]

it's dominated by pure technical types (hello, Linus Torvalds) that seem to have very little patience for non-technical types. In order to have a commercially viable version of Linux (or UNIX) you've got to involve people that can design an attractive, usable UI. For evidence, just look at what Apple has done with OSX and Google has done with Android. Both are beautifully designed and easy to use yet still have the power of Linux/Unix under the covers. You've got to have talented designers and good documentation. Otherwise it will be relegated to a hobbyist platform. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, but it is what it is.

If you have a question, just ask

[he-sk]

Telling people to "do your utmost to avoid asking questions that you can find the answers to" is really bad advice. I've seen this sentiment a lot and Eric Raymond wrote an entire article (How To Ask Questions The Smart Way) that boils down to RTFM and is outright contemptuous of newbies.

Asking questions is a fast way to get a problem resolved and people should not be intimidated from doing that. On the mailing lists I frequent, newbie questions are asked all the time and answered fairly quickly. A nice side effect is that you learn something new by skimming posts that aren't relevant to you. So asking questions has a benefit to persons other than the one who's asking. Other mediums, like IRC channels, exist to get problems resolved quickly and how can you do that if you do not ask?

Now, I agree that you should do some research before asking, simply because it might be quicker to find an answer that way. But if after a bit of research you can't figure it out then go ask a question!

When does an OS change?

[unixisc]

Windows 3.1, Windows 95-ME were very different OSs from Windows NT, much less Vista. In case of the first 3, the underlying OS was DOS. In case of NT, the underlying OS was Windows, but on a win32 API. Architecturally, NT was nothing even close to Windows 3.x, except for the appearance. The Windows name was common for branding purposes, even though they shared some things, such as parts of the API, and so on. Vista, again, as well as Windows 7 & 8 are based on win64. Again, different enough to be considered a different OS.

The Ubuntu example is not exactly analogous - it would be something like putting something like Compaq's DesQview or HP's Dashboard on top of Windows 3.1. In the case of Ubuntu, the OS is Linux, and the DE that they put on top is GNOME/Unity on top of X. NEXT & Apple, like Microsoft, don't have a clean separation between XNU, Quartz and Aqua the way you have on other Unixes or Linux b/w the base OS, X11 and the DE, such as KDE or GNOME. So I don't think that analogy is exactly parallel.

Re:When does an OS change?

[BasilBrush]

In the case of Ubuntu, the OS is Linux

Linux is a kernel. Then there's a whole load of software stacked on top from GNU and others, then one of several desktop UIs. That makes for a distribution. Each distribution being different.

When (ab)using the word Linux to mean the whole caboodle, it's clearly covering a family of OSs rather than a single OS.... If we're being consistent with you saying OSX isn't NeXTSTEP.

As to Windows, absolutely it used to be a desktop environment on top of DOS. Became a self contained OS with Win95. And had the different architecture of NT merged in along the way. And yet you're pretty much on your own if you say it's a different OS.

There's no right or wrong answer on any of this. Different platforms have their own standards for what constitutes a distinct OS, rather than a new version or variant of an existing one.

But I think OSX has a pretty good claim for being the recent releases of NeXTSTEP.

Re:When does an OS change?

[unixisc]

I was (ab)using the term 'Linux' to mean everything below X11. In other words, call it GNU/Linux if you please, but essentially, on top of the CLI based OS that's a combination of those 2, you have X11 sitting, and on top of that, the DEs.

With Windows, the fact that applications written for Windows could normally seamlessly run on subsequent OSs contributed to its being considered a single OS family. Although win64 based OSs break that - you can't run win32 apps seamlessly on Vista or 7 or 8. And the incompatibility within win64 grows - you can't run IE10 on Vista.

About OS-X & NEXTSTEP, reason I consider them different is that Apple took a long while to come out w/ that OS, in sharp contrast to how quickly they came up w/ NEXTSTEP ports to both SPARC and HP-PA/RISC.

Matching Contributors to Projects.

[Jastiv]

Part of the problem with getting contributors for projects, and finding projects to contributors is matching the skills, interests and abilities of the people who want to contribute, with the needs of a project looking for contribution. So far, our community has a poorly implemented trial and error process, leading to frustration on both sides.

I've tried to get more contributors for my project www.wograld.org , but the few people that had an interest did not meet all the requirements to be able to make meaningful contributions.

The new, revised list of requirements is as follows.

1) broadband internet connection. 2) Distro of Linux with admin privileges on a desktop and/or laptop. 3) Skill in one or more of the following 1) C programming 2) Java programming 3) gnu autotools, 4) Pixel Art 5) Perl coding. 4) Ability to read the README and install the game (I will help if asked, but I can't do it for you, sorry) 5)An interested in RPG's, MMO's in particular 6) Willingness to follow the design document, also known as the project mission statement and statements about what the project is supposed to do as shown on the website. 7)Basic Familiarity with the command line of Linux and command line tools. 8)Time to devote to the project, preferably 15+ hours a week (although for small fixes less time is needed)

I've often envisioned a sort of combination of a social networking like website with a dating site like match up system, and social networking capabilities designed to help match contributors to projects. But I have neither the time (like thousands of years) nor the the skills (like php ) to code such a thing.