Getting Started Contributing Back To Open Source 99
Posted
by
kdawson
from the foot-in-the-door dept.
from the foot-in-the-door dept.
markfreeman writes "The one burning need I have felt over the last year was to get involved with open source as a contributor. I have wanted to help with documentation, advocacy, and most of all, with programming. Here's the story of how I got started, thanks to openhatch.org (which calls itself 'an open source involvement engine') and how you can too."
Re:There's something not quite right about this (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for your thoughts on the site!
The project pages are actually generated from the list of projects people have said they contribute to. So it is all things that people on the site have worked on, in one way or another.
The point of our the project is to help people find the *official* channel to contribute, and I think having that information in another place can't hurt.
I really don't want the site to feel gross and astroturfy, since it's actually organic! So your feedback is helpful, if somewhat painful to hear. (-:
Oh, yeah, and our hosting is two little Linode virtual machines, so we do suffer a bit more than huge sites like Launchpad when a load storm comes our way. We're working on performance, too. (-:
-- asheesh at openhatch.org.
Re:Bah... (Score:4, Informative)
This is why OpenHatch focuses on projects that have bitesize bugs.
There are projects that *want* new contributors, and they're marking tickets in their bug trackers as good for newcomers.
You can read more about that at https://openhatch.org/blog/2009/get-involved-in-foss/ [openhatch.org].
(It's 2am, and I'm going to sleep!)
Re:There's something not quite right about this (Score:4, Informative)
Not to steal your thunder, I think OpenHatch is wonderful, but it does remind me an awful lot about launchpad.
For those of you unfamiliar with LP, launchpad.net [slashdot.org] is another site like this, that tries to get people involved with F/OSS projects.
You can contribute bugreports, fixes, Q&A about software, provide translations...
It used to be focussed around Ubuntu and Gnome (because the site is run by Canonical Inc.), but nowadays the site has really taken off (no pun intended) and hosts many kinds of FOSS projects.
I like how OpenHatch makes FOSS-involvement something you can boast about on forums/social networking sites using their HTML widget.
It makes me want to get my hands dirty and get involved
Re:easiest way to get involved (Score:4, Informative)
Bit funny that you use "Steam-junkie gamer buddy" as a example since Steam is apparently going to be officially released on Linux within a few months. Of course, time still have to prove whenever it's good or not (GPU drivers is still somewhat problematic for Linux).
But I have to agree that you need to introduce Linux (and OSS) where it makes sense to.
Re:easiest way to get involved (Score:4, Informative)
You've hit on a key issue in not just small donations but in lots of business models, too. There are problems with most payment methods for small payments.
Small checks through the mail are efficient for the sender, but are terribly inefficient for the recipient. That's even true if a stamp is used to endorse them. Then there's the small but real risk of fraudulent ACH transactions when you send an unknown entity a check. Then there are failed check hassles, too. Even small checks can be insufficient funds if someone's overdrawn already or they could write an old check on a closed account by accident.
Accepting credit and debit cards is pretty efficient for the recipient for larger values, but with fixed per-transaction fees in addition to the percentages, most merchant accounts aren't worth using if a large proportion of transactions are for small amounts.
Sending coin or currency through standard post is fairly efficient, and there's typically a reasonable risk of loss on the part of the sender if the payments are small enough. There are pretty good systems for counting coin and cash. There's an issue of security through obscurity for the recipient, though, since targeting the recipient's end of the mail could score a pretty good chunk. How does one let honest people out in the public know where to send cash while keeping the delivery end secure? A post office box is more secure than the average customer location mail drop, as are slots into a building or a locked customer box. There's still lots of people involved in getting the money there, though. People, even ones screened by the Postal Service for honesty and integrity, are always a possible weak link to security. Some projects have had at least limited success with this process, though. Barry Kauler of the Puppy Linux project accepts cash for mailing CDs to people (and would probably accept donations in cash, too). He accepts US dollars, Australian dollars, and Euros/a>. He recommends PayPal. I hope I haven't hurt the security of this system for him by mentioning it on Slashdot; anyone who's been to the Puppy site could have already known about it. [puppylinux.com]
PayPal is an option. They have similar per-transaction and percentage-of-transaction fees to credit cards. For donations, they require no setup fees, no monthly fees, and no monthly minimum. There is a $0.30 transaction fee on top of the percentage for donation receipts of less than $3000 per month (if this source is timely [fundraisin...etters.com]). That makes single-dollar donations feasible but expensive. Anything less is not worthwhile. I haven't found the pricing info for donations on PayPal's site after a few minutes looking, but the prices listed at that fundraising news site are in line with their commercial payment services.
Amazon has a system that lets any Amazon customer pay you a donation for 5% plus as little as $0.05 if you're a 501(c)(3) non-profit in the US and the donation is less than $10. Check out their prices [amazon.com]. They also have a similar low-cost cutoff for non-donation payments [amazon.com] and even a micropayment system that tracks payments under $0.05 at 20% with a quarter-cent minimum cost [amazon.com] for both donations and sales.
Google has Google Donations [google.com] which for any US 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) non-profit (but not other 501(c) subcategories) which follows the standard transaction fees [google.com]. For organizations that are qualified and are accepted into the Google Grants [google.com] program, Google Donations processing is free while the organization is in good stand
Re:easiest way to get involved (Score:4, Informative)
Opera was adware until Sep. 2005. By the time it was released as freeware Firefox already had a much larger market share (11% vs ). [onestat.be]
Re:Write User Documentation (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, dear Lord, user interfaces. They're tough to write well, and one of the great flaws of oopen source. Try the guidelines at the bottom of http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html [catb.org].
One thing Eric missed in his rant is "throwing things out". Most of CPAN, for example, should have been flushed down the toilet as incompatible with thermodynamics, much less the last five yearf of Perl releases, years ago. Subversion should have thrown out Berkeley DB as an unstable piece of unusable debris years ago. And password based FTP should have been discarded as a bad idea 10 years ago, but Matlab continues to rely on it for upstream file transfer with no built-in HTTPS or WebDAV.
What are these idiots thinking?