Why do people want to have an "open-source" career at all? Why are people asking, "what should I contribute to?"<p>I honestly don't understand this attitude at all, assuming the people who want to "do" open source are in earnest, and not because they want to pad their CV in order to get a job completely unrelated to free software. So, assuming you really do want to do free development, why do you need help being told where to start? The typical self-motivated reason to start is because you have found open and free software that doesn't do what you want it to do, so you go ahead, and by golly, you've had enough of these blighted bugs, and you're going to make the software work for yourself (or rarely, for someone close to you that you care about).<p>Shopping around for something to work on without having a personal problem to solve seems like putting the cart before the horse. I assume that's not why people want to do it. They must already have a personal problem. So, what is it, what's the motivation to have a "career" in "open-source"?
I must say Github has been amazing in enabling this, at least the first steps bit. Ever since they introduced editing in the browser, I have committed to maybe half a dozen open source projects. All of these were trivial one-liners with very little added value, but still, given that I could do all that without even having git on that given machine, is amazing. That + integrated CI tools whose results are integrated within relevant pull requests... it's at a point when almost anyone can fix documentation or typos in code.
Having a popular open source project is a pain in the ass. At some point the happiness from seeing people use your project turns to annoyance once you become the janitor and problem solver to people who won't take 1 minute to read the README. However, I honestly appreciate people who create open source software and answer all issues and questions.<p>GitHub should have a Q/A section on repos so that frequently asked questions can be answered there instead of having someone open the same issue every few months.
Rust is among the most welcoming of communities to start out in. If you're interested in the language, definitely check here for easy ways to get involved.<p><a href="https://www.rustaceans.org/findwork/starters" rel="nofollow">https://www.rustaceans.org/findwork/starters</a>
I've recently made a contribution to a well-known project (DBeaver, a database management software). It started with a feature request and somehow I was able to implement it myself. It sure makes you nervous when it's the first time contributing, especially because your code/issue will be read by many other people. But, once your PR is merged, you will feel you've accomplished something great and want to contribute more.
I started my own project free libre open-source project. It become quite popular in a year. I even found a guy who wanted to "invest" XXXk (I said no), and I won a grant of 25k from one non-profit accelerator (but never able to receive it). Also, I already had couple of job opportunities I rejected, and already spoke with some legendary folks from Open Source world about the future of the project. So it is definitely interesting and worth doing. The only downside is you need to invest some time into it. So it's better to do something what's really interesting for you.
Maybe a better title would be "start working open-source into your career".<p>The article is more geared toward those who think they don't fit into the open-source community.<p>Rest assured, anyone is welcome; that is generally what free software is about.
I value the altruism of open source.<p>But I do not value people that piggyback on existing high profile projects for personal gain.<p>If someone tells me they contribute to a project, I would usually check what was actually contributed.<p>A couple of unit tests and docs are always helpful but do not give enough credit compare to the effort of building such projects.
Open source has a problem where a lot of people demand and request updates, fixes and all that without ever giving back.
I am not talking about medium sized companies or even smaller ones, I am talking to a plethora of small one or two human teams that do consulting/freelance development and simply don't have the visibility in the world of open source that others like maybe you and me have.
It feels a bit like the recycling problem, it's really easy to do yet only a percentage of the population does it correctly. In the uk, on the
defra.gov.uk website, it states that only 16% of the picked up waste is recycling... Why ? How can wr change that?
Different terms convey different ideas. Writers pick "open source" to signal that they find user freedom unimportant, and "free software" or "libre software" to signal that they find user freedom important. While the author's intentions are probably good, it's interesting that neither user freedom nor licenses are mentioned in this type of article.<p>In the unlikely case anyone wonders what I mean:
<a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....</a>