Lesson 20: Contributing to Open Source
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Overview
- Open Source
- Assessing a New Community
- How to Get Involved
- Finding a Project
- First Steps
- Know Your Licenses
Open Source
- Learn lots of new things, and grow as developers.
- Give back to a community that has given you something.
- You have more to contribute than you may realize!
- Meet amazing people.
- Personal fulfillment.
Community Benefit
Share the Love (and the Code)
Personal Benefit
- 'Learning the Ropes' of a substantial code-base
- Working with others
- Getting code reviewed
- Documenting contributions
- Testing your changes
Free?
- Free Software:
- [Free Software] means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.
Free?
- The Four Freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Assessing a New Community
Things to consider when looking for a project.
Elitism vs Nice-ism
Is the project welcoming?
Communication style
Documentation and Guides
Things to Look for
- When are the top pull requests time-stamped? Anything older than 3-4 months might not be ideal.
- Open / recent issues (especially with help wanted labels) are good.
- Many contributors means they're used to people helping out.
How to Get Involved
- [Setup] Documentation
- Testing
- Asking Questions
- Writing Code
Finding a Project
In order of perceived usefulness:
I Can't Find a Project I Like!
That's okay.
First Steps
Find a project
Read Contributing and Getting Started docs
Look at list of issues
Do a thing!
- Write a test
- Fix a typo
- Deploy and update the installation docs
Know your Licenses
Know your Licenses
Licenses to use:
- MIT
- Apache 2.0
- AGPL/GPL/LGPL 2/3
Licenses to *not* use:
- Public Domain Dedication