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?

Comments

Snarky yet true

[PhrostyMcByte]

The real question should be:

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

technical communicator

[swell]

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.

Re:Cult

[rudy_wayne]

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.

Mod the parent up.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:In my experience -

[amber_of_luxor]

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.