Contributing to Open Source (Why? and How?)

Open Source products are everywhere now, probably now you're using some of them. And I am sure that a lot of people are appreciating the role of open source. This post is about giving back to the community, helping others and moving forward one of the applications/tools you're using as a part of your everyday life.

Why Contribute to Open Source??

Sun Microsystems had a slogan "Change (Y)our world". And that summarizes what contributing to open source is all about. It's about making You better and making The World better. Let's make it clearer.

When you contribute to open source it helps you in some many ways, it gets you to code and practice and enhance your programming skills. Then gets your code reviewed, reviewed and then reviewed once more before it becomes a part of an official release. And finally it gets you to document your code.
Of course how much a project adds to your skills depends on the scale of the project and the importance of the feature you're implementing.

On the other hand, when you contribute to open source you're giving back to the community, helping improve the project you're contributing to and hence making someone's life easier by introducing a feature or fixing a bug and your code is out there for people to learn for it.


How to Contribute to Open Source??

First, you'll have to choose a project.
  • Start small, choose small project with a small code base that you can get familiar with easily and you can get the people who wrote the code easily too.
  • Choose a project you use, so you can be able to know what it needs and have clear vision of what's used for, what type of users you're targeting and what's missing that you once needed.
  • Choose a project you like, and that way you'll be able to give it the time and get to have a reason to commit some time for developing, testing and documenting.
You can start by scanning active projects on sourceforge or github where you can find active small scale projects.


Second, start communicating with the development community.
  • Join the project's development mailing lists and start scanning the e-mails to sense the trends and topics of interest to the community currently.
  • Join the project's IRC channel and start asking the questions you have (search for answers on the mailing lists, wiki and blog posts before going to IRC so you get an answer).
  • Chekout the code and compile it.
  • Check the project's bug tracker and try fixing a bug or two before working on a feature.

Finally if you find that you can work on the project CHECK FEATURES LIST START CODING.

Comments

  1. Ruben BerenguelMay 4, 2010 at 3:21 PM

    The best way to choose a project is to choose a project
    a) you use/want to use in another setting
    b) want to add/improve something
    c) is within your knowledge

    My contribution so far are porting applications to the Ben NanoNote, but the good point about it is that it satisfies the 3 motivational points, which for me, are the most important.

    ReplyDelete
  2. John StumpoMay 4, 2010 at 9:10 PM

    For finding a project that fits you or looking for small bugs or tasks to get started on to get to know some project, a good resource is OpenHatch.

    https://openhatch.org/

    ReplyDelete

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