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GitHub Urges Companies To Participate In 'Open Source Fridays' (opensourcefriday.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the TGIOS dept.

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: GitHub wants to help more people become open source contributors with a new initiative called Open Source Friday. As the name implies, the program encourages companies to set aside time at the end of the week for their employees to work on open source projects. It's designed to bolster the ranks of open source contributors at a time when many businesses rely on freely available projects for mission-critical applications. Open Source Friday isn't just about getting businesses to offer their employees' time as a form of charity, it's also a way to improve key business infrastructure, according to Mike McQuaid, a senior software engineer at GitHub...

McQuaid hopes that carving out employees' time on Fridays could help provide additional structure and incentive to participate in the ecosystem... Users don't need to be engineers in order to take part, either. While code contribution is important to the success of a project, creating and maintaining documentation is also key.
OpenSourceFriday.com includes tips for interested contributors, as well as a page suggesting to employers that they could see benefits like developers learning to code faster, better, and more transparently.

4 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Not really new by Aighearach · · Score: 3, Funny

    In the old days we did Microsoft Free Fridays, so there is at least some tradition.

  2. We hired two of their former... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    employees that were pretty damn good, but they fired them because they are white males. I will never trust GitHub again since they're getting rid of some of their best employees.

    1. Re: We hired two of their former... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      As I understand it, they only fired employees that demanded vacation time that they had earned. As someone that I'm over twenty years that has never taken a vacation day off, they are lazy. You want to get rid of lazy people.

    2. Re: We hired two of their former... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Wow, fuck you. A mental break is needed. If one person leaving for two weeks screws everyone, it's because the employer isn't hiring enough people. You're a pathetic pawn.