Getting Started Contributing Back To Open Source 99
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."
Good for you (Score:5, Interesting)
Glad he felt the desire to give time back. I think that one thing that can help out open source is to let the developer know that you liked their software. Bug reports are good but when they all pile up, it kinda makes development feel more like work. The next program I'm releasing soon (http://suso.suso.org/xulu/clide) is going to have a --warmfuzzy option that will allow the user to send a ping like feedback back to the author to let them know that they enjoy using the software. Kinda like a ring the bell if you liked the service thing. All too often open source tools are used and the developer doesn't have any feedback as to whether their software is being used successfully or not. I'd like to help change that.
Re:easiest way to get involved (Score:5, Interesting)
And to demonstrate what is better about it. Far too often OSS is portrayed as "I can't buy X, so I'll download Y" rather than "Y is better than X, so I'll download it". Look at Firefox, it didn't get to be popular by being a clone of IE, but by being better.
and being 'better' isn't necessarily always about OSS doing the job better than the proprietary alternative. Sometimes, it's just a better fit for a certain environment or situation, and that in itself is a reason to push OSS.
Here is an example:
A friend of mine teaches art. When they get to the photography units, he can have the class schedule their lives around access to 1 computer, he can require them to each pay hundreds of dollars for photoshop (good luck with that) encourage piracy (potential of getting caught/losing job), OR he can hand out burnt copies of Gimp to every student to use at home.
is Gimp objectively better than photoshop? no way, but it does the job, and for that situation, Gimp is a much better fit. And the Gimp GUI for the last few versions has been similar enough that what is learned in one program will work in the other.
but pushing a vastly inferior OSS project, who's only merit is that "it's free" probably does more harm than good. Lets not forget, the super expensive proprietary version is also 'free' to anyone with a high speed connection and some free time.
Re:Write User Documentation (Score:1, Interesting)
This is actually the best way for non-developers (and non-geeks for that matter) to get involved.
When a developer/geek writes documentation, they look at it from the standpoint of "Here's how to get X to create Y using Z". The documentation tends to be filled with jargons, and assumes that the end user is already competent in using the program.
When a non-developer/geek writes documentation, they look at it from the standpoint of, "Here's how I make my computer do the thing that I want it to do using your program".
That kind of documentation can make or break a program.
Re:There's something not quite right about this (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
If that is truly your goal then why don't you try doing some of your own research (such as contacting project leads, collecting activity stats, etc.) to develop content for your site rather than trying to just be "organic"? Sure, it's a lot of work, but quality content from authoritative sources still matters. I wish that more Web 2.0 types would put in the effort to create it, rather than just dropping a fishing line out in the interwebs to see if something bites.
I miss the days when content was king, and having some high-quality content in the beginning could really help kick-start the organic process. For every success story like slashdot, wikipedia, or whatever, there's a graveyard of hundreds that fell flat trying to harvest the world's collective intelligence onto their site. Do some of the legwork you expect from your users and, at the very least, you'll gain valuable insight for your business.
Openhatch/Bite-size bugs complaint... (Score:3, Interesting)
The bug was created a year ago and has some activity on it, including a patch. Looking at that history though, it's not clear whether the problem has been fixed nor what action is now required. The actual fix is seemingly simple, but no-one can agree on the exact form the simple fix should take. I wouldn't say that's a great introduction for a newbie to the project.
Re:Openhatch/Bite-size bugs complaint... (Score:2, Interesting)
ThunderBird bug #92165? (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me of ThunderBird bug #92165 - Cannot rename a local folder to its current name with different case
Although the apparent action required there is that...
laymen, who merely encounter the bug, find it odd, and go through the trouble of creating a mozilla bugzilla account to post on the topic.. are told by the people who understand the bug and know exactly how to fix it, to create a patch themselves if they find it so important.
If that is the general response people who are enthusiastic about open source projects (given that there's plenty of other free-as-in-beer mail apps) are greeted with, I can see why a newbie programmer would raise an eyebrow and think to themselves that submitting a patch is likely going to be greeted with "if people want this fixed, they can take your patch and re-build thunderbird themselves".
Re:There's something not quite right about this (Score:3, Interesting)
We are contacting project leads. I'm reaching out to my friends and the projects they're working on, and blogging about this stuff on Planet Debian (since I'm a Developer on Debian).
http://openhatch.org/wiki/Bug_trackers [openhatch.org] is where we ask that project leads write about their bug trackers so we can import them into openhatch.org/search/. We're trying to find more projects that label bugs as "bitesize."
On project pages, we're hoping that the people who add projects to their profiles follow the link and leave a note. Maybe we could nudge people with a bigger message, asking them to do that?