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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
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.
Between work, my SO, kids, things that need to be done around the house, and a dozen other random things that come up from week to week any free time I have isn't going to be donated away.
The free time I do have is going to be spent relaxing and de-stressing from all of the above.
As a career technical writer, I once tried to help out a few open source projects by improving their universally bad documentation. In all cases, my contributions were belittled, and often far worse than that, eliciting scorn and disdain from the "l33t programmers" who thought I was just wasting repo storage and bandwidth. This was something I did on my own time, to improve projects for the benefits of others, for no money.
As a result, it didn't take me long to say "fuck it" and leave those open source projects to wallow in their own filth. They're little more than a cult, and if you don't conform to the leaders' idea of what a contrib should be and do, you're not welcome.
You're absolutely right. Hipsters are killing open source projects left and right with their fucking awful UI changes.
Just look at what happened to gedit. It's a text editor that comes with GNOME.
Gedit used to look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png
It had a clean, usable, consistent UI. The major functionality was easily available, and the UI was extremely intuitive and efficient to use.
The hipsters can't stand for usable software, of course. It needed to be "improved"!
This is what gedit looks like more recently: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png
I'm not joking. That's really what it looks like. Using it is even worse than it looks.
Gedit's UI today is fucking awful.
It's like they've taken the worst aspects of tablet UI design, and forced it into a text editor that's probably never used anywhere but on desktops and laptops.
The traditional menus and toolbars are gone, replaced with incomprehensibly bad icons and a shitty Chrome-style hamburger menu that's an unusable jumble of unrelated functionality.
It's absolutely fucking moronic what they've done to gedit. They've managed to completely destroy the UI of a text editor, for crying out loud!
Why the fuck would I want to contribute anything but a total and complete reversion back to the old UI? Getting rid of this shit-for-brains UI is the best possible bugfix that gedit could undergo right now. But will it be accepted? Of course not! The hipsters can't possibly be wrong about the UI.
But, how is that specific to open source?
It sounds like the problem with people in general... You find these flaws emerge everywhere on the commercial software spectrum from mass-market consumer applications to meat and potatoes business applications, enterprise verticals, bespoke consulting and in-house development. There can often be a cult of the lead developer, architect, product manager, VP, primary customer, next customer, or last customer.
It seems to me that the only difference with open source, as with any labor-based market, is that your contributions are not as fungible as with cash purchases of software? It is not as trivial to change your mind and send your money elsewhere, both as an individual participant and as a customer base. It's a bit more like society and politics in that regard...
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...
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?
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
But, how is that specific to open source?
Because of money.
With commercial code, programmers are paid, and people will put up with a lot of crap to keep their jobs.
More importantly, paying customers are much harder to ignore than freeloading users.
If you don't give customers what they want, they go elsewhere, and you go out of business.
When you have to meet payroll in a week, and you don't have enough money in the bank account to cover it, you will find a way to refocus your priorities away from petty power games.