Comments | brad: Contributing to Open Source projects

brad

Contributing to Open Source projects

Mar 20, 2010 18:12

Prior to joining Google I always joked that Google was the black hole that swallowed up open source programmers. I'd see awesome, productive hackers join Google and then hear little to nothing from them afterwards. When I joined I decided I'd solve this mystery and post about it but it's been over 2.5 years and I've been busy and somewhat ( Read more... )

google, hack, open source, work

Comments 17

thedimka March 21 2010, 02:05:45 UTC

If people want to help an Open Source project with graphics or UI it is even harder to do, because most designers are not that familiar with source control and most of the time there are guidelines or any directions on how to contribute anything for improving UI or any usability part.
Probably it would be useful to have a paragraph with instructions for people like that.

poor usability ext_228581 March 21 2010, 07:22:42 UTC

I have experienced open-source as a very closed community, it is dominated by a developer mindset (that is impenetrable to anyone who is not a developer) that is extremely limiting it's reach.
http://www.iamronen.com/2009/10/closed-open-source/

iamo March 21 2010, 02:16:29 UTC

Github has gone a huge way towards reshaping this scenario as a rule. My first instinct now on wanting to know more about how something was implemented in an open source project or to contribute to it is to check if it's on github. I don't even bother looking for info in the README or related ALLCAPSes until after I've checked there.

And if it is, I can pretty easily guess that it's going to be fairly easy to contribute. Of course, that doesn't mean projects shouldn't also link to the main github branch or somewhere like it.

askbjoernhansen March 22 2010, 23:37:52 UTC

Yeah - I want to second that. git makes this process about a billion times easier. Even without github it's trivial to make and manage your patches (maintain your fork, really) until you figure out where to send them and get them accepted "upstream".

bluesmoon March 21 2010, 03:55:22 UTC

I started writing opensource code in 1999, and I wrote a lot of it. I was also a very heavy contributor to various lugs in my area and on irc. Then in 2004 I joined Yahoo! and the bulk of my contributions stopped. Over the following months I almost completely disappeared from the mailing lists I used to frequent ( ... )

ext_228575 March 21 2010, 04:06:38 UTC

I haven't found figuring out *how* to contribute to be terribly difficult, especially given that most of the projects I've been interested in are on GitHub. The complaint I have is that many times patch submissions (or "pull requests" in GitHub parlance) go into a black hole, with no response from the maintainers of the project. Frustrating.

And so... anonymous March 21 2010, 06:05:29 UTC

When are you going to solve the other problem? The bigger one is of large companies swallowing open source contributors and them no longer giving back to the community that made them so employable.

I know it's asking a lot, and google is probably the least of the problematic communities, but it seems like you solved the wrong problem here ;-)

(Matt Sergeant - forgot my LJ id)