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Ask Slashdot: Non-Coders, Why Aren't You Contributing To Open Source?
Jason Baker writes: Most everyone is using an open source tool somewhere in their workflow, but relatively few are contributing back their time to sustaining the projects they use. But these days, there are plenty of ways to contribute to an open source project without submitting code. Projects like OpenHatch will even help you match your skill set to a project in need. So what's holding you back? Time? Lack of interest? Difficulty getting started?
they don't make it easy
they don't have a good list of helper that have helped
there are not enough tools to quickly provide them all of my os/cpu/motherboard/hd/videocard information (yes sometimes this is needed for bugs)
and honestly not even the summary says how non-coders can help?????
if they want help they should put up giant buttons/links "WE NEED YOUR HELP NO MONEY OR SKILL REQUIRED!"
neoforts at gmail
If I start spending time contributing back to open source, then open source is no longer the cheapest and best option for the areas in which I use it.
This. Open Source people tend to be fundamentalist in nature, which doesn't exactly make it easy to contribute. Compromise, agreement, pragmatism - these are all foreign concepts to them.
That example is an extreme head scratch-er for sure. However, contrast that to The GIMP, which has had a consistently bad UI for over a decade. Programmers don't always make the best UI decisions, and just because it's intuitive for them, it's not automatically intuitive for everyone.
Somewhere between the gedit bastardization and 70% of open source projects, there is a balance that can be made. Should be made.
Good old The GIMP. My favorite UI fuck-up of theirs is making save do a project save, and having to do export to save as JPEG, PNG, etc. If you complain about the interface You're told you aren't the target audience. They are targeting a professional Photoshop knockoff market that doesn't exist, and yell at their actual core userbase.
For all the talk of the ridiculous name, at my conservative Windows based workplace GIMP is available in the software catalog. I think they want to have a free offering to avoid people looking for Photoshop, etc. Thankfully they also have Paint.NET.