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Ask Slashdot: Non-Coders, Why Aren't You Contributing To Open Source?

Posted by Soulskill on from the afraid-of-linus's-wrath dept.

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?

12 of 488 comments (clear)

  1. Re:not cost effective by ruir · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Contributing can be part of work. I already contributed a line or two in the past for a couple of open source projects, including the linux kernel. Also, contributed with bug reports, which are/were of my interest. Notably, I always got personalised answers to bug reports, which is far more of want I can say for other non-open source OSs I used in the past. I would also not mind to donate do devuan, if I believed it is a serious project.

  2. Snarky yet true by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The real question should be:

    Why aren't companies paying more people to work on Open Source projects.

  3. technical communicator by swell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've offered my services, found no takers.

    I'm a Mac user, and I've rarely had to read a manual to know how to use Mac software or hardware. But that stuff you geeks turn out needs a lot of explaining before ordinary people will benefit from it.

    I've offered my services in software design such that software will be so friendly that no manual will be needed. No takers. As a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication I was respected in the commercial world but snubbed by Open Source.

    I'm reminded of when my associates programmed in dBase. At the time I designed Apple & Mac databases that anyone could understand and use to good effect. They could even safely modify parts of it. My associates preferred to create systems that users could NOT understand or use easily. Even another dBase programmer would have difficulty. Their strategy was to keep the client dependent on them. I tend to believe that many open source programmers retain that mentality.

    --
    ...omphaloskepsis often...
  4. Re:Cult by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    Exactly. I have tried almost all of the methods of contributing listed in the article and have either been ignored or rejected.

  5. Mod the parent up. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The parent isn't "trolling", for crying out loud. Anyone who has tried to deal with GNOME, Mozilla, or even Debian any time recently will know exactly what the parent is talking about.

    They've all become rotten hipster cults, in my opinion. Mozilla is particularly bad. They've trashed the UI of their most popular product, to an extent that only hipsters can manage. They've employed a strict "we know better than you" hipster attitude toward user complaints about these changes. They've forced out at least one long-time, high-ranking leader merely because his views on an unrelated political matter didn't match their hipster ultra-politically correct beliefs. They waste resources on fucking idiotic projects like Firefox OS, just because they want to me-too the hipsters at Google and Apple.

    These sorts of hipsters have now invaded Debian, and are in the process of trashing the entire project using systemd. They completely trashed GNOME a few years ago, during the GNOME 3 tragedy.

    Why the heck would any sane, normal, non-hipster person want anything to do with those people and those projects?

    1. Re:Mod the parent up. by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They've all become rotten hipster cults, in my opinion. Mozilla is particularly bad. They've trashed the UI of their most popular product, to an extent that only hipsters can manage. They've employed a strict "we know better than you" hipster attitude toward user complaints about these changes.

      You've got to be kidding. The Firefox UI is barely different really. Big deal, you have to press "Alt" to see the menu bar now; whoopee. If you want to see a trashed UI and "we know better than you", GNOME is the poster boy for this stuff.

      They've forced out at least one long-time, high-ranking leader merely because his views on an unrelated political matter didn't match their hipster ultra-politically correct beliefs.

      No, they forced out their CEO because there was way too much controversy surrounding him. Mozilla isn't just some open-source project like Debian or Gentoo or whatever, it's a full-fledged corporation, and corporate CEOs are partially political positions. You can't have that position filled by someone who doesn't match the publicly-stated corporate values, who makes the corporation look bad, who attracts too much negative attention, etc. Any other for-profit corporation would have done the same in their position, except maybe some crappy company like Comcast which doesn't give a shit about what people think of it since it's a monopoly. Mozilla may be a corporation, but they're a non-profit and funding is critically important to them and public image goes hand-in-hand with that. A bad public image will kill their funding.

      This is an entirely different matter than some random FOSS project playing political games with their leadership. Groups like Slackware don't deal with much money or employees, and can do whatever the hell they want. Mozilla isn't like that; it's a corporation.

  6. Re:In my experience - by amber_of_luxor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I quit submitting bug reports, when I realized that even when I provided precise instructions on how to reproduce the bug, the gatekeepers claimed to not know how to reproduce the bug.

    --
    Wind Beneath Thy Wings
  7. Re:Look what those assholes did to gedit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  8. Mod the parent up. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm the person who modded the parent troll. Perhaps I should have used "flamebait" but I rarely bother with the distinction. It was modded down because all it does is make the inciting claim without any backup explanation. If he'd posted that sentence followed by one of your paragraphs, for example, he wouldn't have earned the mod.

    This is no different than a few other comments on the thread, and how I modded them. Both of the following posts tell the article submitter and the open source community to fuck off, but they do it in very different ways. I hope you can see why they earned different mods, and why the parent you care so deeply about is more like the first than the second.

    Subject: What?
    Body: Here's your answer: why don't you go fuck yourself.
    Mod: -1 Troll

    Subject: I don't care
    Body: I work with computers all day at work. When I get off work, I'm not going to work on them even more, and for free to boot. Sure, I'll play on computers, and even web surf and make snarky comments on /., but work? Fuck you, pay me.
    Mod: +1 Insightful

  9. Tech Support Here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I work at an software company, in the enterprise tech support department. I'm the tech support liaison to engineering. I use JIRA all-day everyday. I even fix minor bugs on my own dev box.

    I've offered my help on several open source project. No response or even worse, dickhead response. They are not interested. So please stop running articles about how non-coders(and I do code, I'm just not an "engineer") can help with open source projects. They don't care.

    And FYI: It's not much better in the commercial world. Engineers do not get promoted for fixing bugs. That's just reality. In fact, the engineers assigned to fix bugs are doing it because they are on the VP of engineering's shit list that week/month/year. So they are really thrilled to be working on these things. It makes my job so much easier! (i.e. extremely frustrating)

  10. Re:Cult by aaronb1138 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's hard enough to get software developers to fix a problem in a product for which one is paying. Nearly every issue I have run into with open source is a driver or compatibility issue which was previously documented years prior to my own stumbling upon it. The developers weren't interested enough back at that time to fix it, and it leaves me with little faith that it is worth my time to chime in with a "me too", not to mention the hate for resurrecting old threads or bug reports.

    Part of the problem with open source is freedom. Not enough people sat down at their desk and told to fix it instead of working on what interests them.

  11. Re:Cult by aaronb1138 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One model which would work functionally but massively reduce the headcount most FOSS projects like to tout would be the Habitat for Humanity setup.

    Tell people that to contribute, these are the days and times for which they can sign up. Tell them what scope knowledgeable leader they will be reporting to. Let the group leaders track down who showed up (physically or virtually) and hand out assignments.