Making a Difference for Millions:
Contributing to FOSS

Presented by Elizabeth Krumbachlyz@princessleia.comwww.princessleia.com@pleia2

Elizabeth Krumbach

Debian Systems Administrator

Member of the Ubuntu Community Council

Board Member of Partimus.org

Launchpad.net bug # 713087

Allow Unity launcher to be resizable

status: New Opinionstatus: Opinion Invalidstatus: Invalid Newstatus: New Confirmedstatus: Confirmed Opinion

Andrea Azzarone wrote a patch for this

status: Opinion Confirmedstatus: Confirmed Triagedstatus: Triaged Fix Committedstatus: Fix Committed Fix Released

Looks great! Thanks Andrea Mark Shuttleworth

Do you contribute to FOSS today?

Do you want to contribute to FOSS today?

How is it organized?

Who pays for it?

Linux Foundation: 70% of all kernel development is done by developers who are being paid for their work

Why?

The parties!

Friends!

Travel!

Learning!

Organized events

One on one mentoring when you start working

Experience

The hands on, productive involvement you can engage in will improve your skills.

It's common for potential employers to search for information online about applicants, open source involvement is frequently valued

Yes, you can put it on your resume!

Making a Difference for Millions

(or thousands)

(or hundreds)

(or dozens)

(or just you)

More likely, you'll be part of a smaller project which just impacts thousands

Webcalendar Debian package

Xubuntu and Ubuntu Women websites

What?

Programming

First thing people think of.

Of course this is vital!

That said, that programming is less useful if no one can use your application, or get help, or find your software

Working with Bugs

Who has ever submitted a bug?

One of the best ways to contribute to large projects that doesn't require any specialized skill is to close or merge duplicate bug reports.

Ever fixed a bug? Great for people new to programming, improve your skills by writing fixes!

Also: Feature requests, suggestions

Documentation

Ever use open source software that had bad documentation?

irssi: /usr/share/doc/irssi/manual.txt.gz

.. no, the docs end here, I got bored of writing these after a few days and haven't touched these since then.

Blog! Google is not official documentation but it's one of the first places people look for answers.

Projects often have documentation in formats such as docbook or texinfo don't let this scare you off. if you submit the documentation in plain text there is a good chance somebody with more experience will format it for you, and thank you too!

Support

User support mailing lists IRC Forums

Testing

Important different user environments, different usage cases

Some developers (me) testing approach might be it works for me: release!

Virtualization and ability to run ISOs from USB sticks makes this much easier

Design

F/OSS projects have a terrible reputation for having ugly applications

Programmers hack together basics.

Icons

Websites

Community

Administrative: Keeping site up to date (dead sites suck!) Planning meetings Sharing results of IRC discussions Resolving disputes

So those are the primary ways to get involved.

In a Project like Ubuntu: planning an event (conference, LUG, etc)? Help organize and attend! Volunteer to man a table or do a presentation!

How?

Go to their website, look around

Join mailing list(s), IRC channel, forums

Get a feel for the community

...or

Just submit a patch.

First Steps

I and many people I know have spent time getting a feel for a community

But some people recommend that you just submit a patch

Show some understanding of the project when you present your ideas

People don't appreciate new people joining their project and trying to rewrite everything without being familiar with the history, environment, culture

Not all projects accept contributions from new people immediately

Exceptions, sure! Bugs? It's ok to just jump in and report.

Not every project is active

You may want to avoid projects that are:Huge and with high entry barriers

Run by companies in an over-the-fence style

If you work in tech, you may have restrictions placed on your involvement with open source

Watch Out!

Projects may be inactive due to lack of volunteers, loss of interest by founder. Probably don't want to get involved unless you are prepared to do everything.

Big projects are great, but barriers to entry can be discouraging and difficult to overcome for a new contributor.

Over-the-fence a company develops something, licenses it as F/OSS, but doesn't actually engage a community it is sometimes possible to get involved to submit patches and the like, but it's tricky.

Your company might even encourage F/OSS contributions, but ask that you use their name or keep their name out of it.

At the end of the GPL, there's a form for your boss to sign. It's so important that it's included as part of the most popular free software license.

Respect other contributors

Follow procedures in place for contributions

Follow through with commitments

Avoid insulting the work of your predecessors

Focus on constructive criticism and comments

Don't fork the project

Tips

Procedures for contributions have been developed and typically are in place for a reason (sure, you can disagree, but understand the environment well enough to feel confident you can bring up this disagreement productively).

It's frustrating when new people come along with the attitude I worked on this thing that will help the project, they should accept my help on my terms

You're new, criticism is normal, nothing personal!

If you make a commitment to a project, follow-through volunteer status doesn't matter

Many of the people working on F/OSS projects are volunteers like you, they may not be able to drop everything and respond to you quickly.

Have fun!

Questions?

Credits

Lydia Pintscher Talk title suggestionLaura Czajkowski UDS ice skating photoMike Edwards Philadelphia photoJorge Castro Unity bug exampleTrevor Calabro grecipe icon setMartin Owens Reasons to Love Ubuntu posterMike Joseph Slide review