I'm looking to contribute to open source projects but just could not find the time since coding without pay is so foreign to me. I could not just approach my employer and ask if I could help code this open source project. What is your motivation for doing such things, thanks to all the open source maintainers!
Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
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Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
#2Yes, although mostly in small, incremental ways.
I try to use entirely free and open source software on my personal laptop (and I'm fortunate enough that my work environment is fairly similar too).
When I encounter some kind of annoying issue, I'll take a look at the code that caused the problem (and sometimes the components that it interacts with), and if there's a way to improve the situation then I'll consider putting together at least an issue report.
In practice the time and thought required to write a code-level description of the problem can sometimes be 90% of the work to develop a fix, so frequently the issue report is followed swiftly by a patch / pull request / merge request.
Review, merge and release can all take time - at various points I've had over twenty changes pending to more than ten separate projects.
It's extremely satisfying and encouraging to wake up or check your email and be reminded about some kind of nagging bug/problem that you encountered months or even years ago and to hear that it's now solved for you and anyone else who would have run into the same issue in future.
A suggestion, although everyone can learn in their own way: consider treating open source contributions the same way that you might do for small tickets or tasks at work.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
#3Valid reasons for me are: particular interest in a project, desire to learn a language/technique/framework, genuine and intrinsic interest in a community and the open source movement.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
#4Certainly not as much as I used to, but yes I contribute to open source projects. It's a combination of making things I'm interested in, drive by patches for tools that almost do what I want or have a bug that I've managed to trigger, and chatting with others building things they're interested in. Being a maintainer is a different ballgame than contributing to a project without the long term responsibility, though both can scratch an itch and help develop new skillsets while helping to create new pieces of software.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
#5I use FOSS in my personal computing needs which heavily intersects with my professional interests. Using 3rd party (FOSS) exposes me to bugs, issues with documentation, problems running things on esoteric hardware, security issues, eventually performance issues. Because of this I often need feedback from maintainers and I'm at their mercy for how fast my issue is resolved.
Supplying a patch, giving feedback for issues, is the least I can do to give back to the people who took the time to write that code.
Because some projects I contribute to are also relevant in my day job I get a deeper insight into that part. Money/financial aspects do not play into that decision but I'd be twisting the truth if I didn't admit the positive impact FOSS had to my career.
Having contributed to FOSS projects in a public way also says something about the person I'm interviewing. If most of my stack is built on FOSS and an applicant comes along with a cool CV but has not one contribution to a single project it's immediately a hard pass from me. I never put applicants through silly technical screening sessions unless they are fresh outta university. But no public commits are a red-flag for senior engineers.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
#6Valid reasons for me are: particular interest in a project, desire to learn a language/technique/framework, genuine and intrinsic interest in a community and the open source movement.
nitpick: 30 or so years later, can we still call Open Source a "movement"?
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
#7I'm lucky enough to work for an employer that defaults to open. The project I'm working on right now is open source.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
#8It's useful to do components independently as open source, to make sure they work in any context, then integrate them into your main project. This makes both of them better products.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
#9I have made PRs to patch bugs I find on projects that I have used in production applications. Sadly that is as much as I have done, I would love to contribute more but I'm so burned out from work I don't have the energy to do more outside of it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?
#10I try to contribute fixes/features I want and think make sense to upstream as much as I can, on projects I'm using either for myself or at work. I've mostly worked for companies that recognise it's worth the extra time to get a patch in a good state to upstream/do the docs/PR properly to avoid being forced to use a fork.