Hi HN -<p>I'm looking to get more involved with open source projects. From your experience, are there any projects that you have been involved with where you are impressed by how kind, supportive, talented, and effective the group of people are that work on the project?<p>Thanks,
Mike
Elixir and its ecosystem (plug, ecto and phoenix) has been above and beyond every time I've contributed. Helpful, patient and kind, and also very smart guys.<p><a href="https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir</a><p><a href="https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug</a><p><a href="https://github.com/elixir-lang/ecto" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elixir-lang/ecto</a><p><a href="https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix</a>
Find the projects that speak to you then check in on the communities. Contributing to open source is first and foremost _work_. A community can turn you off from participating, but the motivation to contribute only comes from the product.<p>And you might be surprised at the difference between what it's like to contribute to any random project compared to what a "news" blogger that needs to generate hits wants you to think the average project is like.
To answer the question asked: I've been on the LLVM mailing list for a few months now, and been highly impressed both by the technical quality of the project and by the competence and supportiveness of the people involved.<p>To address a meta-question: I disagree with the people who claim that you shouldn't contribute to a project for any reason other than intrinsic interest in the product itself. Most people, after all, work for extrinsic reasons; it's a normal part of life. There is nothing wrong with contributing to an open source project to improve your programming skills, boost your resume or pay some of your karmic debt to your species for the gift of your life. These are all valid reasons, and all are flexible regarding the specific nature of the project.
Have you heard of Mozilla? <a href="http://mozilla.org" rel="nofollow">http://mozilla.org</a><p>I'm a Mozillian myself and I can tell you I wouldn't have been one if the community wouldn't have showed me such a great and kind support since the first minute I decided to step in a introduce myself. Plus we breathe OSS and have multiple talents of every kind.<p>Mozilla works serving, promoting and protecting the Open Web, and provides the tools to do so by ourselves. Firefox is -mostly- a community effort, with translators, designers, and coders from all around the world.<p>If you decide to join, feel free to say Hi in the forums of the community: <a href="https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/" rel="nofollow">https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/</a>
Getting involved with open source should likely not be done of how a community is, but rather because you love the product itself, and want to make it better. If the community is nice, that's a huge plus, but in my opinion it should not really be a deciding factor unless the community is outright hostile.<p>Just try to ask in general, see applications you use frequently: Desktop, web, and browser based. Programming languages, and websites you find yourself in frequently. See if any of those are open source, and then send the author(s) an email, ask if they accept contributions.<p>Do make sure to ask, I've had cases where I asked an author if they accepted PRs in general, and the response was "I'm sorry no, I would much rather maintain full control over the codebase", which is perfectly fine, in general, find something you are passionate about, and then try to help.<p>I would really advise against starting open source contributions just for the sake of contributing to open source.<p>When you go into a project the existing contributors will likely have to spend time, and effort grooming you into someone who can properly navigate the code base, in my experience people who join a project just for the sake of joining something, or because they want to have "Contribute to Open software in my free time" in their resume tend to drop out pretty frequently, and it's just painful for all parties involved.
Drupal's community is what got me into OSS, even though the language (PHP) community seems to be at a strange crossroads currently.<p>I've also been somewhat involved in Ansible's community, and it's been nothing but a positive experience so far.<p>It's interesting to compare some of the different communities; some seem to value technical competence over diversity, some UX over architecture, etc. It's probably easiest to dip your toes in the water and just make sure you can get help early on—jump into IRC or forums and see how people react to some initial questions you have about the project.
React. I'm constantly impressed by Ben Alpert's[1] patience and response time and ability to answer questions all over the internet.<p>1. <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/tags/reactjs/topusers" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/tags/reactjs/topusers</a>
The reasoning behind that question doesn't make any sense. The idea of contributing to a project that you're not personally interested in, solely based on an external reason seems wrong to me. That's true for-pay software development, but is even more true when it comes to open source development.<p>I think you'd be a lot better off looking at projects you are currently using, or in areas that are interesting to you, and hanging out in their IRC channels, reading their mailing lists for a while, checking their bug tracker, and tinkering with their code.<p>At the very least, you should clarify how you want to help out, what you're interested in doing, and what your skill set is.<p>The way it's phrased right now, you'd get more meaningful answers just randomly clicking projects on GitHub.
I'm the lead for LXQt, the Qt-based desktop environment: <a href="http://lxqt.org/" rel="nofollow">http://lxqt.org/</a><p>I'm very happy to say that everyone on our team is kind and supportive. I'm also happy to say this is not a unique trait of our team, it's something you'll see in a lot of open source projects.<p>Feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile) if you're interested in LXQt.
The JuliaOpt / JuMP (Julia for Mathematical Programming) team has been responsive and supportive. When I file a Github issue at a random hour, they respond in minutes. The quality of code and testing is outstanding, and frankly for a project started in academia that's rare. In the dynamic world of pre-1.0 Julia, they've set the standard for 3rd party libraries, accommodated deprecations from the language immediately as versions change, and overall driven the advancement of scientific computing.<p><a href="https://github.com/juliaopt/jump.jl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/juliaopt/jump.jl</a><p>Edit: Here's a great example of the JuMP team debugging somebody's particular script, running it, and benchmarking it - all because somebody filed a Github issue. <a href="https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl/issues/614" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl/issues/614</a>
I've made small code contributions to Firefox and Servo, both Mozilla projects, and I have nothing but good things to say about everyone involved with the two projects. As a newcomer to both, the respective teams were very welcoming, helpful, and most of all, patient especially during the review process.
The ZeroMQ community is incredibly supportive towards newcomers and existing members alike. And ofcourse the people of the community are really smart, because you dont build a scalable and lightweight (and popular) messaging framework unless you are smart.<p>I have pitched in with a few (simple) commits once in a while and am looking to contribute more regularly.<p>Here's all the code: <a href="http://github.com/zeromq/" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/zeromq/</a><p>And a very comprehensive guide: <a href="http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all" rel="nofollow">http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all</a><p>And, the contribution process followed is known as C4: <a href="http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:22" rel="nofollow">http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:22</a><p>You can get in touch via IRC, which is #zeromq on irc.freenode.net ; Try to linger around after asking your questions, and someone would eventually respond.<p>You may also send in your queries to the ZeroMQ mailing list. (<a href="http://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev" rel="nofollow">http://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev</a>)<p>Some of us also hang out in the #zeromq channel in the Slack group for Golang: <a href="http://gophers.slack.com/" rel="nofollow">http://gophers.slack.com/</a>
I've contributed to a few Python projects, and the experience I had with the IPython and beets groups both stand out in my mind as very friendly. The patch I contributed to IPython was vanishingly trivial. It removed an unnecessary function call in a code path that wasn't even performance-sensitive (I just stumbled on it when looking into a more complex issue). I would have understood if the patch just lingered without being looked at for ages. It didn't address an existing issue, didn't impact the correctness of the code, and barely had any consequence to performance. But, it was quickly reviewed and accepted and the maintainers were thankful to have my contribution. I was very pleasantly surprised, and will certainly consider contributing to their project again when I have time. Likewise, I ran into a bug in the beets MP3 tagging/collection manager and was able to report the issue, discuss it with the author and other contributors to determine the preferred way to handle the situation, create a new unit test and fix, and get it accepted all within a couple of days. Everyone I spoke with was very inviting and helpful. I hope to be able to help them again in the future as well!
The Perl 6 development team is generally good-natured and work to be pleasant to each other and newcomers. <a href="http://perl6.org/" rel="nofollow">http://perl6.org/</a>
Apache Tinkerpop: <a href="https://tinkerpop.incubator.apache.org" rel="nofollow">https://tinkerpop.incubator.apache.org</a><p>The TinkerPop project is thoroughly documented, questions in the user groups are answered fast, and the R&D keeps pushing the space forward. For example, check out this new paper by Marko Rodriguez (TinkerPop founder and creator of the Gremlin graph programming language):<p>"Quantum Walks with Gremlin" <a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06278v1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06278v1.pdf</a><p>Here's a quote from a community member:<p><pre><code> Something like 13 yrs ago, I was trying to do server-side Java. It
was a nightmare, until I discovered a thing called Apache JServ.
It was simple, elegant and the developer group was wonderfully
supportive and well organized.
Just as with JServ, way back then, Tinkerpop has all the same
characteristics, and gives me the same feeling of having hit on
something really valuable that will take me a long way.
Well ... JServ morphed into TomCat, and I've used it consistently
ever since. I'm confident Tinkerpop is going the same way, so I'm
only too pleased to help where I can.
Sincerest regards,
Hasan
</code></pre>
Source: <a href="https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gremlin-users/pF577035UpY/M7t9uIiIOtIJ" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gremlin-users/pF577035UpY/M7...</a><p>Disclaimer: I am a TinkerPop contributor.
Off the top of my head:<p><pre><code> Ansible
FLTK
SCons (when I used it. I wouldn't recommend the project, but I do recommend the community)
Nim
Python
ffmpeg (mostly supportive, but expect you to be mannered too)</code></pre>
The open source project that needs you are the very ones that are unkind, not supportive with less talented teams.
Someone needs to join them and lead, to show kindness, to teach how to be supportive of newbies, and to bring talent.
Can't recommend <a href="http://www.onyxplatform.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.onyxplatform.org/</a> highly enough. Tight core of extremely talented and passionate engineers who are working on an exciting project in a more exciting space.
Visit <a href="https://openhatch.org/" rel="nofollow">https://openhatch.org/</a> -- they exist to match people with good open source projects. Good luck!
I would encourage you to check out OpenStack[1]. As a community we are trying really hard to be welcoming and helpful to new contributors.<p>[1]<a href="http://docs.openstack.org/contributor-guide/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.openstack.org/contributor-guide/index.html</a>
<a href="https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs</a><p>Great community, has a very friendly Gitter chat room where people collaborate, very nice maintainer as well.
Nightscout. Software for people with and affected by Type 1 diabetes by people with and affected by Type 1 diabetes. <a href="https://github.com/nightscout" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nightscout</a>
TeX Live <a href="https://www.tug.org/texlive/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tug.org/texlive/</a> people are awesome, the output is very widely used, and here for the long haul.
I'm biased, but I'll say some stuff I work on and stuff that is general integrated into the openstack (and greater python) ecosystem(s) (each project in openstack IMHO has its own culture, so you may need to explore to find a match for you).<p><a href="http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/</a><p><a href="http://docs.openstack.org/developer/tooz/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.openstack.org/developer/tooz/</a><p>Any of the other libraries on:<p><a href="https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo</a><p>We (myself and the rest of the oslo team) try to be friendly folks so feel free to drop by on freenode at the #openstack-oslo channel.<p>Other openstack projects:<p><a href="http://governance.openstack.org/reference/projects/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://governance.openstack.org/reference/projects/index.htm...</a>
The open source world is flouring in 2015.<p>There is no shortage of amazing teams working on amazing projects on the web.<p>Its hard to single out just one of them - so its best if we could know more about your background.<p>If you are unable to find anything that is good enough then just start your own !<p>Do not be be demotivated - as long as you find it useful - someone else somewhere will also find it useful.<p>Even simple logging libraries have their audience.<p>So good luck !
The people working on the redox project have been awesome the times I have interacted with them and can always use additional hands. Everyone there seems to buy into the common goal idea.
<a href="https://github.com/redox-os" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/redox-os</a>
I'm the tech evangelist at Zalando and co-organize our Open Source Guild. Our engineers fit your criteria and would be open to your contributions:<p><a href="https://github.com/zalando" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zalando</a><p><a href="https://github.com/zalando-stups" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zalando-stups</a><p>We have projects in Go, Clojure, Python, Scala, Java ...<p>I'm a beginner-level coder and my colleagues have been extremely supportive, staying late to teach me JavaScript and reviewing my Python. Let us know if you end up contributing: @zalandotech. :)
<a href="https://github.com/nylas/N1" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nylas/N1</a><p>I really do enjoy the Nylas team and are well receiving of any issues I find or any support I need developing a plugin.
Right now ReactOS is doing better because they used Indiegogo funding to hire better developers:
<a href="http://community.reactos.org/index.php/news/years-progress-the-shell" rel="nofollow">http://community.reactos.org/index.php/news/years-progress-t...</a><p>I tried to post a link to ReactOS via submit to find out I got the "Whoa you're submitting too fast" message, so I lost submit privileges somehow. I apologize if I submitted anything wrong.<p>Creating a free and open source alternative to Windows that uses Windows apps and Drivers, one that isn't based on Linux is really hard and need really talented people to keep compatibility with Windows.<p>I think when their 0.4 release is available, it will do better than the 0.3 releases. With Windows 10 giving people privacy concerns there needs to be an alternative that runs Windows apps to compete with Windows that uses Windows drivers.<p>They just got Steam to work with it and if they get some of the Dotnet libraries and DirectX to run some of the video games, they can put a dent into Microsoft Windows usage.<p><a href="https://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=114980#p114980" rel="nofollow">https://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=114980#p114980</a><p>Yeah I know can run WINE with Linux, but ReactOS is targeted at people who can't figure out Linux but want a Windows type OS.
Why not start contribute to Mozilla?<p><a href="https://mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/" rel="nofollow">https://mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/</a>
Qt and Qt3D. I haven't contributed as much to Qt as I've wanted to, but the little I did was met with support and great mentoring. They are a very talented group.<p>If you're interested in physics, mathematics or other sciences, I'd recommend SciPy. I attended one of their conferences and met many really nice, kind and talented people. (Open Source conferences and meet-ups are a great way to get to know people and kick-starting contributions.)
I've found that OS communities have largely come a LONG ways over the last few years. Most are helpful and are full of smart, nice people. That said, there are always going to be a few less than cordial people in every crowd.<p>When picking an OS project to get involved in, there are only two suggestions I have:<p>1. Make sure there's a fair sized community behind it with > 1 committer (not much worse than getting involved with a project that just dies)
2. Make sure it's something that's going to hold your attention for a good while and it's something you're passionate about. Generally, contributing to OS projects isn't really a fly by night thing (of course depending on the level of involvement you're looking for). If you get involved with a project that has a great community but isn't something you're actually passionate about, chances of long term involvement aren't really high.<p>From personal experience, the Python community has been the most enjoyable for me to date. Filled with academics and hackers, scientists and CRUD so developers, I have yet to see another community filled with such diversity from which comes intelligent, positive discussion and results.
You could try mine :)<p><a href="https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/README.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/README.md</a><p><a href="https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/README.md#contributing" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/README.md#con...</a>
It's hard to just "pick a project" and start contributing. You need a little bit of passion, excitement, or just plain need. Look at the tools that you already use and depend on and start there.<p>Odds are you know how to set them up, configure a few things, and the like. In most cases, a few pull requests to the docs are not just welcome but greatly appreciated.<p>(I've been managing projects since 2007 and participating since 2001.)
Awesome open source crews:<p>* Rancher - <a href="https://github.com/rancher" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rancher</a>
* Weave - <a href="https://github.com/weave.works" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/weave.works</a>
* OpenStack (IRC) - irc.freenode.net #openstack
* Kubernetes - <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes</a>
* Docker - <a href="https://github.com/docker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/docker</a>
* EmileVague - <a href="https://github.com/EmileVauge/traefik" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/EmileVauge/traefik</a>
* Enspiral - enspiral.com
* MetaMaps - metamaps.cc<p>....That's an incomplete list of projects whose teams have put up with me, and even gone so far as to ask for more. I've worked in OSS for a little over a year now, and I can heartily say that I haven't regretted the decision once.
I've been impressed with working on [syncthing][]. The team is very open to discuss anything that comes up, which makes it easier for me to tackle things.<p>I've also been impressed with the user experience of the product. Installation and configuration was much easier than I expected, and then it just runs!<p>[syncthing]: <a href="https://syncthing.net/" rel="nofollow">https://syncthing.net/</a>
Epic's Unreal Engine 4 team and the community around it is an amazing kind, supportive, friendly and talented group of people.<p><a href="http://unrealengine.com/" rel="nofollow">http://unrealengine.com/</a><p>Its one of the reasons I got back into game dev and chose to use this engine.<p>The engine itself is state-of-the-art and the improvements per each release is AWESOME.<p>As the engine is a commercial offering that is open source, there are a lot of people involved. This makes it easier for new people to get onboard.
They twitch on a biweekly basis
<a href="http://twitch.tv/unrealengine/" rel="nofollow">http://twitch.tv/unrealengine/</a><p>Have a look at the last two release notes for an example of what they get up too.<p><a href="https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-49-released" rel="nofollow">https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-49-released</a><p><a href="https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-10-released" rel="nofollow">https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-10-release...</a><p>If I recall correctly, 4.11 is more a stability release then feature release. It is the release currently being developed. Check out the Trello board to see what features are being developed where<p><a href="https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap" rel="nofollow">https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap</a><p>I'd advise to sign up for an account, link your github account, have a look through and join the forums.<p>I've got the same account name on there if you have any questions.
I think the SocketCluster community meets this description (I'm the main author). Especially on the kind/supportive side. It's relatively small (about 60 people in our chat group), we are not supported by VC funding of any kind so everyone is just doing it for fun (and to please the community). Based on the experience I've had using Gitter (chat) to get assistance on other projects, I'd say our helping/chat culture is among the best.<p>Also if you have a truly good idea, it will be heard and implemented.<p>Website:
<a href="http://socketcluster.io/" rel="nofollow">http://socketcluster.io/</a><p>Gitter (chat):
<a href="https://gitter.im/SocketCluster/socketcluster" rel="nofollow">https://gitter.im/SocketCluster/socketcluster</a><p>I think this 'niceness' comes from being a small, dedicated, growing community based around learning and having fun. If the community is already large and successful, you will just be a small cog in a big machine.
I'm not seeing this mentioned at the top level, so I'll say it. I'm impressed with the team and community of Go:<p><a href="https://golang.org/" rel="nofollow">https://golang.org/</a><p>A few great points:<p><a href="https://blog.golang.org/open-source" rel="nofollow">https://blog.golang.org/open-source</a><p><a href="https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/13073-code-of-conduct.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/13073-...</a><p>It's the first language/open source project for me that I consider having "the" community, or at least one I care about being a large part of. I was mostly doing C++ before Go, and that didn't feel like something that had a single unified community around - there might've been many different ones.<p>But yeah, I've really been enjoying Go, its community and the project's future prospects.
If you're into games at all, I would highly recommend the Godot Game Engine (<a href="http://www.godotengine.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.godotengine.org</a>). They are very active on IRC and in the forums. If you have a question, you'll almost certainly get an answer. They are also are very welcoming of contributions.
Open edX, the stack powering edX.org, is a very interesting (and useful!) project to contribute to. The community and the reviewers are very friendly. There are byte-sized tasks available to get started, and you will get guidance on the tickets and PRs. It's a large Django code base, and changes you make impact millions of students within a week - as real and concrete as it gets. : )<p><a href="https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING...</a><p><a href="http://bit.ly/edxbugs" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/edxbugs</a><p><a href="http://open.edx.org/" rel="nofollow">http://open.edx.org/</a><p><a href="http://github.com/edx/edx-platform/" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/edx/edx-platform/</a>
Apache Mesos and it's ecosystem (Apache Aurora, Marathon, Apache Myriad, Chronos etc.) has been the most kind, supportive and talented ecosystem of open-source projects.<p>It's a community of individuals who are very talented, patient, helpful and inviting.<p>Disclaimer: I work at Mesosphere, and one of the co-founders of Apache Myriad.
Mozilla:
Firefox accounts content server is for example very awesome with an amazing team and a lot of bus for beginners<p><a href="https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-content-server" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-content-server</a>
I found the community around Squeak (<a href="http://www.squeak.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.squeak.org/</a>) to be extremely pleasant and supportive some years ago. I suspect the offshoot community around Pharo is similar.
Relative 'new comers' to the block, the Ionic Framework has an amazing hands on team behind it and the community as a whole is fantastic. <a href="http://ionicframework.com" rel="nofollow">http://ionicframework.com</a>
If you're interested in iOS & Android dev / automation tools you should check out <a href="https://fastlane-tools" rel="nofollow">https://fastlane-tools</a> and <a href="https://www.bitrise.io/cli" rel="nofollow">https://www.bitrise.io/cli</a> . The two projects have a fair amount of overlap, but handle a couple of key concept differently (e.g. built in modules in fastlane vs decentralized step library in bitrise). I'm more than happy to help you get started if you would decide to contribute to bitrise
FreeBSD has a kind, international team of developers. It may be a scary project to contribute to for beginners to open source because it is an operating system, and people have some apprehension about improving operating systems.
PlatformIO: <a href="https://github.com/platformio/platformio" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/platformio/platformio</a><p>The author has gotten involved personally to help me with issues I was seeing. He provided advice on architecture and use case, and he does an extremely good job of keeping the product current.<p><a href="https://github.com/platformio/platformio/issues/330" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/platformio/platformio/issues/330</a>
I recommend looking into re:dash, which is an amazing and widely used data collaboration tool for your data. Arik Fraimovich is doing a great work with a growing community of contributors.<p><a href="https://github.com/getredash/redash" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/getredash/redash</a>
<a href="http://redash.io/" rel="nofollow">http://redash.io/</a><p>Disclaimer: I'm the founder of EverythingMe, re:dash was born in one of our hackathons but have since become its own beast.
Hi Mike,<p>I have found the twitter/finagle guys to be very welcoming:<p><a href="https://github.com/twitter/finagle" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/twitter/finagle</a>
<a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/finaglers" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/finaglers</a>
<a href="https://gitter.im/twitter/finagle" rel="nofollow">https://gitter.im/twitter/finagle</a>
From my experience, SDL, Ogre3D, and Dragonfly BSD were great. There are other projects I've made contributions to, but many of them are a lot more challenging to engage with.
If you are interested in javascript, rackt[1] team is working on awesome stuff.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/rackt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rackt</a>
Octave and Mercurial. I'm involved in both. Come by, and if I see anybody being even slightly unpleasant, I'll be sure to call them out and help you feel welcome.
Hugo[1,2] is pretty nice. Very responsive team too.<p>I like the discuss forum[3] they have, it's not particularly high volume and people are pretty good to each other.<p>[1] <a href="http://gohugo.io/" rel="nofollow">http://gohugo.io/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/spf13/hugo" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/spf13/hugo</a><p>[3] <a href="https://discuss.gohugo.io/" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.gohugo.io/</a>
i had a fantastic time contributing some code to the ghost.org blog platform. they are incredibly well managed, fantastically transparent, and provide a great deal of support for people contributing to the codebase. very much an a+++++++ would contribute again situation.<p>Probably the thing that sets any receptive project is its ability to identify areas where it needs help and setting aside well defined (and documented) projects in those areas. In many projects, there's lots of work needed to be done but the priorities aren't obvious and so lots of contributions get left on the floor because they're just not in any way priorities for the active maintainers. it takes lots of work and maturity for a project to advertise this sort of stuff which is why these situations seem few and far between.<p>Regardless, try to invest time in filling in the <i>current</i> needs of projects rather than unsolicited work. some unsolicited work (bugfixes) is easily accepted, but features are often hard to incorporate especially if they're not aligned with the short term goals of the project.
@antirez is all of the above to an amazing extent, however redis is one of the hardest projects to contribute code to from my own experience.<p>The community is awesome and very friendly and helpful though, and I reckon most of my contribution to redis has been as a community member helping out others or getting involved in discussions of redis' future, which is also a great way to get involved.
Jinteki.net: a platform to play Netrunner in the browser. We welcome contributors and have a Slack where devs can ask questions. Send me an email if you want an invite.<p><a href="https://github.com/mtgred/netrunner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mtgred/netrunner</a><p><a href="http://www.jinteki.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jinteki.net/</a>
openFrameworks is extremely supportive, built from the ground up using volunteers, receives regular contributions by artists giving code back, and is in constant need of quality control (so many platforms to support natively...)<p><a href="https://github.com/openframeworks/openFrameworks" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openframeworks/openFrameworks</a>
It is a bit more than a open source project, but I really like the community around the <a href="https://indiewebcamp.com" rel="nofollow">https://indiewebcamp.com</a><p>I wrote in more detail about it half a year ago: <a href="https://jeena.net/indiewebcamp-2015" rel="nofollow">https://jeena.net/indiewebcamp-2015</a>
I'd have to say NetSurf (<a href="http://netsurf-browser.org" rel="nofollow">http://netsurf-browser.org</a>).<p>I'd barely joined the IRC channel and was discussing UI enhancements when it was mentioned I could have my own branch on their private Git repo server if I wanted :D<p>That was hugely welcoming, in my book!
The <a href="http://hood.ie/" rel="nofollow">http://hood.ie/</a> community is nice. Also, I was rather happy with etherpad’s community: <a href="http://etherpad.org/" rel="nofollow">http://etherpad.org/</a>
I cant say this without bias, but being a welcoming project has been one of my main focuses with <a href="http://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb</a>
Lucee has a very active community and there isn't the division and disagreement I've seen in other projects.<p><a href="https://github.com/lucee/Lucee" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lucee/Lucee</a>
Surprised that no one mentioned Facebook's Presto project: <a href="https://github.com/facebook/presto" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/facebook/presto</a><p>Presto team is just awesome.
If you're interested in Python and Lisp, Hy (<a href="https://github.com/hylang/hy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hylang/hy</a>) is great. They're welcoming and funny.
Wine's an amazing open source project, a compatibility layer project for running windows applications on POSIX-compliant OS's (OSX, Linux, BSD etc) started 22 years ago and still going strong. The devs are super talented and contributions are always welcome.<p>I've been contributing there and my so far my personal experience has been positive, fun and challenging at the same time :D<p>There's literally a ton of different things that you can contribute on and while there is some initial friction in getting patches accepted, they always make sure to point you towards the right direction to get your patch accepted. They also hold annual conferences (wineconf).<p>Check out their website for more info <a href="http://winehq.org/" rel="nofollow">http://winehq.org/</a>
In the author of Semantic UI, if you're interested in working on the project you can always email me personally and start a dialog jack@semantic-ui.com
If you're interested in code review / project management platforms, the ex-facebookers behind the long-running tool, Phabricator, are awesome.
This is the ideal we are striving for at <a href="https://github.com/amark/gun" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/amark/gun</a> , and I hope our <a href="https://gitter.im/amark/gun" rel="nofollow">https://gitter.im/amark/gun</a> is evidence of that.<p>We're an Open Source Firebase, with graph data structures and a decentralized architecture. Please give us an email so we can help, mine is mark@gunDB.io .
Oh-My-Vagrant does: <a href="https://github.com/purpleidea/oh-my-vagrant" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/purpleidea/oh-my-vagrant</a>
Disclaimer: I started the project though!
<a href="https://github.com/DemocracyOS/democracyos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/DemocracyOS/democracyos</a><p>Great team & Great project
I think it depends on you background, I'm trying to support this project: <a href="https://github.com/franzejr/best-ruby" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/franzejr/best-ruby</a>
Aren't these mandatory qualities in the open source world?<p>If you enjoy Python, RESTish APIs and all sorts of database backends, you can checkout <a href="http://Ramses.tech" rel="nofollow">http://Ramses.tech</a> a project that I'm involved with.
The day open source will be kind is the day there will be no more discussions.<p>When there is no more discussions and everything looks nice the project as either became proprietary (apache, mysql, nginx), mummified dead (tex) or religious dead (GNU+HURD), or soon to be kind of proprietary (mongodb) or dead of shame (rails) or dead by tyranny (openBSD) or it is a zombie (perl6) or dead from laughing (agile) or dead by bloat (node, angular, react, riak).<p>Well, Choose 2/3
kind & supportive
open source
alive<p>For example the consensus on PHP is vastly due to either true pro making real money out of fixing the mess of PHP spaghetti code, and people having real better tools to make better code.<p>PHP is thus a good example of a dead project that ignores it.<p>PHP is quantically dead.