Why you should contribute to Open Source? | Hacker News Reader

Why you should contribute to Open Source?

shal.in

59 pointshgarg27 comments

The biggest problem with contributing to [edit: established] Open Source projects is the barrier to entry. As someone who gets paid to work on a popular open source project full time, I can tell you it's often way harder than it's worth to get involved.

You need to download and get the code running on your computer, and configure everything to run correctly. You need to learn the ins and outs of how everything works. You need to install and learn about the code the project depends on (and, most projects will have numerous vendor libraries). You need to get acquainted with the main developers on IRC, so you don't step on any toes. You have to learn how they do bug ticketing, and you need to find bugs you can do. And your first code review? Trust me, it'll be painful. It's not easy to get started.

If I left my job today, would I continue to contribute? Sure. But only because I already have a foot in the door, and know my way around.

All that being said, I truly believe universities should require students contribute to at least one open source project- it's a great learning experience, and the projects and their users benefit from the volunteer labor.

This might be true for big projects, but most smaller open source projects are a lot easier to get into and their maintainers are usually grateful for any useful contributions they can get.

Even for big projects there are often good reasons for which they don't accept a certain contribution. The project maintainers usually have a broader understanding of the application, so more often than not, they find important flaws or coding style issues in contributed patches which the contributor has to address before the patch can be included.

This is often perceived as bureaucratic and timidity against changes, but usually this is nothing more than a self-defense against subtle bugs, unnecessary complexity and vanishing readability, for which big projects are more vulnerable than small projects.

It obviously depends on where you start.

I'd say you should start by contributing to a small project, where there usually isn't a lot of red tape to learn. And most large projects have extension mechanisms, so if you want to contribute to a large project, make a small stand-alone extension. Or contribute to someone else's stand-alone extension.

GitHub has massively reduced the amount of work needed to start contributing to a project - click "fork", make your changes, send a pull request. That said, actually learning how to use git in the first place is quite a bit of work.

While I agree that Github has made it easier, it is still not easy. First they will reject because of some subtle formatting error. Then they will reject because you didn't document it enough (or wrong). Then they will reject because your tests aren't done the way they do it. Then they refuse it because you merged and didn't rebase.

There are hundreds of reasons why they won't pull your changes. This doesn't apply to small, single dev programs. They are usually, at least in my experience, pretty happy that someone wrote a patch, but the big ones are really, really bad.

I'm happy if the upstream project is concerned with the quality of commits going into their software. That makes sure that the software will work great and it'll be easier to fix a bug in the future (if the history is reasonably clean)

Basically, if upstream doesn't accept your patch, you have two options:

Either you really want to see your patch upstream. In that case you invest the time it takes knowing that your contribution will be measured by the same scale that everyone else's contribution has been measured with. You also know that your contribution will be usable and part of a stable project. And you'll be confident that it probably won't be your mistake taking hundreds of sites down that are using the project you contributed to and are now hitting a bug you introduced.

On the other hand, you can feel that it's not worth the hassle. That's totally fine. You'll just have to manage your patch on your own from now on (in the end maybe creating an even bigger hassle in the long run).

Git gave you a very nice toolset for merging patches to an externally updated project, so that should be way easier than it was in the SVN days.

What Github did was to actually make it possible to decide either way.

Before Git and Github, your options were to either have it integrated upstream or to be stuck with whatever version you were patching (due to severely lacking merge support)

That hasn't been my experience at all. I mostly contribute relatively small patches to programs that I use myself and see an itch that I need to scratch.

Sometimes it's really hard to get started, but usually the problem you want to solve is in some fairly isolated subsystem and writing a sane patch only takes an hour or two at most.

Of course you sometimes step on someone's toes, but more often than not my patches just get accepted.

I see you work for Mozilla. (Hey!) I work on Mozilla too, I certainly didn't feel like I needed to learn "the ins and outs of how everything works". I work in mailnews and I really have no idea how layout/ etc work. I don't think I know how most of mailnews works, either. I tend to think in terms of abstractions and trust the underlying system, and it's worked really well 90% of the time.

I think the author is missing an important point: You should also contribute to Open Source projects because you are using them.

This is the most natural motivation for contribution. You care about the project not just because it's cool and Free Software and you want to exercise. You mainly care because you're using it everyday - be it your favorite game or an important library (like jQuery, Qt) you use at work.

It is often most sensible to fix the bug where it appears, instead of working around it in your application. And with Free Software (aka Open Source) you can simply do that, without having to ask anyone for permission.

Getting this bugfix/improvement into the official version is a separate step. But it is worth the effort, because the alternative is to maintain your patches separately from new versions of the library. Or, worse, to maintain workarounds for bugs in the library that might or might not be fixed in future versions.

"Open Source projects offer you a chance to work on something that you want rather than something that others want you to work on."

As far as I am concerned starting my own project is more what I want rather than fixing bugs in other people's complicated code which code might also be philosophically very alien to me. To take compromises there is my day job. To work on cool things I start my own project/startup.

This lecture was given to students to start to understand how real software development works and get an edge on their classmates while applying their technical skills.

I think in some ideal world I'd like to see all companies that benefit from oss donate some employee time back to the community.

Ultimately it's mainly the business community that benefits, rather than the coder who are typically paid just around the cost of living.

So, why can't more businesses allocate time to contribute back?

For me, as a designer, contributing to Open Source is a great exercise. But as gkoberger states, it's hard to get 'a foot in the door'. And getting your GUI implemented is also a long process.

How could this be made more lucrative?

If you have spare dev cycles, I'd say it's in your better interest to build a software product that will make you money.

You get all the advantages the author talks about, with none of the disadvantages that the commenters here point out. You get income, and you get something concrete you can point to when it comes time to interview for your next job:

"I built and designed somerandomthing.com from scratch. It's built on the mZungu stack and handles peak loads of 14k requests per second. Check it out when you get a chance. It pays my rent."

Agreed. I find it admirable that people can produce code for purely altruistic purposes. I wish I had the time to do that in between my work that pays the bills and my work on my own project that will hopefully soon earn some money.

At the same time, I do end up using a lot of open source software as part of that work, and when I have issues with it, I do submit fixes back to the project. Sometimes they are accepted (in some form), sometimes they're ignored. This isn't overly time consuming, and if nobody did it, I'd be spending a lot more time fixing bugs myself.

Likewise, I occasionally open-source stuff I build that happens to be reusable. As far as I can tell, none of that code is widely used, but on the off chance that someone is looking for something exactly like it, it might save them some time.

> purely altruistic purposes

Nah, it's because it's more fun to work on open source code! I don't work on stuff that's not fun or not interesting in some way, so there's definitely always an element of self-interest.

I would like to mention building something that makes money, and writing open source code are not mutually exclusive.

When building something to make you money, you're not working with a large group of other developers or "giving back" to any community.

That's exactly why it's valuable to you as a reference for a future employer. "I built this whole thing" is way more impressive than "I helped align the dropdown menu on this one FireFox options window".

As to giving back, there's nothing stopping you. My latest for-profit venture has spun off two open source projects that "the community" can use in the future. Past projects have done the same.

The key is to do things to benefit yourself, with open source being a side product. That's how big companies do it. Why shouldn't it be the same for us little guys?

Well, not necessarily. "I collaborated with programmers all over the world using version control and bug tracking" versus "I built this thing." It all depends on context and what you are trying to say about yourself.

I guess it depends on the employer. A small startup company would probably be pretty impressed with the "I built this whole thing" scenario, because that's what you need when you're a small company. But my experience has been that most employers will be more impressed with the second "I helped align the dropdown menu on this one FireFox options window" scenario. The second scenario also gives you a lot of opportunity in a job interview to differentiate yourself from other applicants. You can basically show that, not only are you a hot shot developer, but you know how to work with people, you know how to explain your desired technical direction and convince others of the value of your plan, etc. Those are valuable skills most employers can't get enough of, and they're things they can't easily get from an offshore development house.

Being mostly from the US, lots of you guys are religious, right? Does contributing to open source projects boost your chances of going to heaven?

Here's my answer on HOW to contribute to Open Source, if you're not a programmer:

http://www.granneman.com/techinfo/linux/contributewithoutcod...

Nice advice for the original target audience of people with lots of spare time who have already sorted out where the rent money is coming from. For the other 90%+ of us not so relevant.

This could be very helpful for those who have not already sorted out where to get rent money to get the job they want.

If people don't have rent money they don't have the time to work on open source as they are too busy working (i.e. in a short-term job unrelated to developing software). So the advice only applies to people who are financially stable but also have spare time such as students.

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