Open Source Notes

oss.textile

Contributing to Open Source
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First Rule: You can find the time
- It doesn’t take much
- Weekends are good
- Find what other time you’re wasting
- Try something that’s not your day job

Second Rule: What to contribute to?
- Scratch an itch
- Help others
- Lend support
- Fame and Glory

It doesn’t have to simply be code!
- Start a technical blog on Posterous
- Use your real name, or a pseudonym.
- No seriously, use your real name.
- Just post error messages and how you fixed them
- Example:
bash: /usr/bin/rails: /usr/bin/ruby1.8: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
- Then link to it from somewhere! Like Twitter.
- Gets the Google Juices Flowing
- Helps other programmers
- Write Documentation
- This is often given as a good starting point
- It isn’t, except when it is.
- Sorely needed
— Maintainers will love you for it
- Help promote the project; blog/tweet/lightning talk, whatever

How to contribute Code:
- As Rubyists, GitHub.
- Fork, pull request
- Read the README
- Older projects: diff to a mailing list
- Ruby itself: diff to Redmine
- Contributor’s agreements
- BSD, not so much GPL.