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What motivates you to contribute to open source projects?

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Re: What motivates you to contribute to open source projects?

#12

Post by _k2vp »

I write a lot of random code that have very little economic value so there's really no point in keeping it private. Sometimes they end up being helpful for other people.

E.g. https://github.com/CopilotC-Nvim/CopilotChat.nvim was written in a single afternoon while sitting at a social event I didn't enjoy and now there's 60 contributors and I've completely handed over ownership/maintenance to the community

I still use an ancient version of obsidian on my phone because it works with my hacks to self host the native sync server https://github.com/acheong08/obi-sync

For other open source contributions, I generally just add features I want or fix random bugs. I use exclusively open source software for everything, no big tech accounts at all. So contributing only helps myself

Re: What motivates you to contribute to open source projects?

#13

Post by UncleEntity »

If I'm poking around in a FLOSS lib and I encounter a bug I'll either submit a fix or a bug report if I can't quite figure out the problem.

About 15 years ago I used to contribute to Blender and did it just because it was something fun to do. The documentation wasn't all that good and if I wanted to figure out what some random button did the easiest way was to read the code and, in the process, I'd find bugs. Also, the Python API wasn't completely comprehensive (this was right in the transition between python 2 and 3) and I took it upon myself to fill in a bunch of holes. Other times some artist would ask for a feature and if it was something within my capabilities I'd oblige. Mostly I'd just try different things and if it were viable I'd submit a patch (where the devs had a different definition of "viable") or horrible fail and just move along to the next shiny thing. Eventually I was given contributor status but would almost always go through the regular patch submission process and/or pester one of the main devs before committing anything.

I started out just learning Blender, because it was interesting, then started hacking on Blender because that was more interesting. In the process I learned a bunch about how python does it thing, which I still use to this day, and got really, really good at hunting down segfaults due to not being the best C programmer.

So, yeah, like everyone else is saying, just find something you enjoy and contribute to that... or don't contribute and just submit good bug reports.

Re: What motivates you to contribute to open source projects?

#15

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

Oh, a ton of reasons. But for me, the big one is that open source work is maybe the single strongest signal I have to the rest of the Internet-faring world that we like to cooperate in this vast, iterated game that is society. That's not not true of paid work, but spending your own free time building cool things other people like and then giving it away is just a whole 'nother level.
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