The remarkable progress made in open source technologies has challenged the bastion of proprietary software makers and at the same time opened new avenues for developers to explore. Today, many web and mobile developers across the world contribute to open source projects for the following main reasons:
Helps in improving their coding skills
The thrill of finding and reporting bugs
In open source, the source code is freely available on the internet for any programmer to contribute towards its development. Such a decentralized approach to software development encourages collaboration, brings in a diverse range of expertise on the project, helps reduce bugs/security issues, and results in a final product that finds greater adoption amongst the end-user.
Such is the popularity of open source technologies today that these are challenging proprietary software in many areas.
Did you know that majority of supercomputers in the world are powered by the Linux operating system? While the Windows OS dominates the consumer side of the market, several small and medium enterprises are running on Linux for the cost benefits. Some of the other popular open source developments include the Mozilla Firefox (browser), OpenOffice (productivity software), DotNetNuke (CMS), Magento (e-commerce platform), etc.
From reviewing code on other people’s open source submissions to writing tutorials on how a project should be used, there are many different areas in an open source project where a developer can contribute.
Consider being an Author: If you have the desired expertise, or you can team up with other developers you can create your open source project and make the source code open for further enhancement.
Active Maintainer: Developers who are actively maintaining any version of an open source project fall under this category.
Get recognized as a Contributor: You help resolve one security issue in a project or contribute in any other way, you would be considered a Contributor to that project.
Join as a Community Member: Most open source projects have active community forums where contributors have discussion around several aspects of the project.
You might be an ace coder having years of experience. However, to find acceptance within the community and get your contribution to any open source project acted upon you need to follow the set of protocols that the community has adopted. How to find that out? Well, most open source communities will use the following tools to organize discussion around these open-source projects:
Pull requests: These help you inform other developers about the changes you have pushed to a repository like GitHub. You can also discuss and review the changes that are in progress.
As developers, if we inculcate this belief of contributing back to the community we will learn and progress in the right direction. It’s the intent that matters. Even if you are just starting your career as a developer, you can still contribute to open source projects by opening issues, actively monitoring projects and reporting errors you encounter, discuss topics or propose ideas, and suggest new features that you feel are missing.