It's more common than you might think. A lot of companies have open source codebases. In fact, I think almost every software engineer job I've had so far have had at least a little public code.
No, they're doing it for their comment, not suggesting others use it for code. It's the new take on "I do not give Facebook permission to use..." trend that went on years ago.
Now you've got the idea of making a game around filling out open street map info. I'll add it too the list of "cool programs I don't have nearly enough time to make" 😔
104 contributions in last year on codeberg, 52 contributions on github (some are duplicated from codeberg due to mirroring), some more in other places.
It does. I wish more people recognized that bug reports are contributions.
Probably only 1% of users file bug reports. That means for every 100 times a bug is found by a user, 99 of them won't bother reporting it. Devs can't fix a bug they dont know about...
I think it depends on the project. Some maintainers really only want extremely comprehensive bug reports that realistically only another dev could produce. All kinds of logs, sometimes requiring special packages installed to produce them.
Which makes sense because someone just saying "it crashes sometimes" doesnt provide much to go on.
code: null, nada, nothing. dunno how
issues: maybe 30 in 9 years using gnu/linux
money: 1% of my income for 5 years now, to whatever project i find cool, mostly smaller ones tho
My job is contributing to the building of an open source project full of shared tools and resources for businesses in my industry to share. I am part of a team of skilled developers and citizen developers across my industry that work to create shared FOSS tools to make all of us more efficient at our work.
I make a 6-figure salary. I should specify that the tools and software I help create are used by data analysts. I am treated in my company like a data engineer.
I sort of lucked into it. I have worked in IT my entire life outside of a couple years where I worked as a server in a restaurant. I also have a 2 year degree in software dev. I left a large company where I did travelling IT repair services for business and private homes to work at a small company as just a standard help desk style technician. I have a tendency to look for inefficiencies in my day to day work and I write scripts to remove those tasks from my day and then I share them with my team. I also have a strong background in cyber security (from personal studying) and infrastructure/DevOps from my own personal projects and home study. So I started getting brought in for infrastructure and cyber security discussions and meetings as a resource. Over the last X years the company has doubled in size and they created a data department and they needed someone to help build out not just the software but the server architecture, CICD workflows, deployment strategies and data ontology. Because I have a proven track record at this company of being able to pick up new topics fast, as well as have shown the motivation to self study on nights and weekends, they approached me for this new role and I took it. And here I am.
The opportunity to expand my skill set, while still doing some infrastructure and DevOps presented itself, so I took it. It's been a challenge. It's a different thought process, but I enjoy being uncomfortable and I enjoy being the noob in the group. I enjoy the process of going from noob to expert.
I actually want to learn enough code to contribute, but there's this gap between "how to code" and "how to participate in a modern software project".
Like, I've created plenty of little things. Discord bots, automation scripts, plenty of sysadmin stuff for work, etc. But like, I clone a git repo cause there's a home assistant bug I'd like to fix for example, and I'm immediately lost on where to start.
I dont know how to code but i have made contribs on repos. For documentation and stuff.
Some repos are very complex and some are simple. It is typically roughly corrolated to size: larger projects = more complex. And then it depends on the language/platform/toolchain being used. Some of them can be very ellaborate. If you dont typically work on that kind of project the set up can be very difficult as you are starting from scratch with dependencies, might need dev versions, can be a whole thing.
Also there are some things which are organizational choices made by the maintainers. A couple of times i was unable to contribute to docs because they werent seperated from the rest of the project and just to edit markdown files you had to install a whole dev toolchain and who knows what. I gave up before getting anywhere. Whereas others have different components segregated nicely.
Then there is quality control stuff having to do with testing, formating and such. You might only find out about that once you've got through everything else and time comes to make a PR.
Start out by using git and github or alternative for yourself to learn the basics. Then pick a smaller, explicitly beginer friendly project to make some minor contributions. Something with a few maintainers and regular contributions from others is generally a good balance. Look for an updated CONTRIBUTING file or equivilant section in the documentation.
I think making a few markdown contribs first is probably advisable even for programers because most of the time it is more simple.
My main hobby is designing and programming embedded devices, and anything I create gets slapped up on my github in case anyone else can use it. Schematics, code, whatever.
I have a side hustle of selling the PCBs I make, but I have absolutely no problems with someone making a clone of my designs. It's not like they're super advanced tech. Anyone can figure out what I've figured out.
Since for the most part i still suck at programming; i help translating programs in my main language since i needed to learn english for my job regardless.
As much as I can. I can't code at all and don't work in IT, but at least I try to help newcomers as much as I can, publish my work as OS license, try to heat up as much traffic as I can on Lemmy (especially for non-tech stuff) and report bugs whenever I find them.
I can't do much more :(
I donate ~30$ a month divided over a few projects but I want to donate more once I can and also to bigger things that would donate for me to many projects and not just the ones that I think of (please give suggestions to such projects or foundations!)
There should be more government funding for floss. Both by prioritizing floss projects to use and direct funding to projects that arent useful to govts.
Whenever I can. Currently I‘m a bit short on change so I just contribute work. Did some translations, filed bugs, raised awareness and helped others use open source software. I also try to learn to code good enough to fix things in projects but I‘m not there yet.
I write a lot of my own software and open source it. And very few of those projects ever have/get any contributions from anyone else. In fact, most of the recent ones literally only have one commit out on Gitlab. And it's pretty rare that I contribute to existing open source projects.
Many years ago, I contributed as part of my job a fair amount to a some WYSIWYG documentation writing web app associated with the Gentoo project. I think that web app is long-since dead and gone. (Not my fault, I promise. Lol.)
Oh, also, I wrote a lot of code as part of the same job that I was always promised would be open sourced, but I kindof had to leave without pushing that issue and that code hasn't ever been open sourced. It's bullshit that still bothers me today, but there's nothing really that I can do about it now. The place is out of business. I could theoretically contact the guy who was in charge (he would have inherited all of that company's intellectual property and would have the right to open source it now), but that guy's the kind of person I'd much rather never have any contact with again. It's a whole thing.
I fairly often send patches for small bug fixes and features. I also maintain a few packages in nixpkgs. I also forked an abandoned project to provide some fixes and updates, so I maintain that now.
I also try to give a donation to an open-source project that I use every couple of months.
I also have a bunch of my own projects that I released as open source, but I don't think that is really what the question is asking.
I've created one project that no one uses. I've found a lot of friction contributing to existing projects. There has to be:
something to do
the maintainer is cool with having it done
the maintainer is okay not doing it themselves
is within my expertise or requires an acceptable amount of ramp up learning
Then I have to make sure to learn their code of conduct and do it exactly the way they want. Do they want testing? Do they want me to update the docs? So I have to get green light from maintainer to start? Etc.
I've created/maintain 5 programs for this rather niche but rather popular Linux based tablet. All of my programs exist to give the owners more freedom with their device and gives users a plausible way to avoid uploading all of their data to the company's cloud. I created installation scripts but also packed the programs into the community package manager. The programs are all feature complete so I hop on every other week or so for basic maintenance and to test how my programs work after the tablet updates. I'm pretty much always around to help users troubleshoot.
Past that I have a few random contributions to OSS I use for bugs I've identified and have been able to fix.
Not often but I have a moment where I do. Last year I contributed a plugin for MusicBrainz Picard which allows you to submit your genre tags to MusicBrainz. I want to give it a proper good update in the future but I'm so focused on other things right now.
I used to contribute more when I was at a job where I was unsatisfied. Python was my first language that I really enjoyed writing, regardless of the occasional warts. There are other many other languages I enjoy. Instead, the job had me writing shitty Ant code when I could write code. So I would contribute to OSS projects in my spare time. Now that I'm at a job where my creative juices get flowing on a regular basis, I contribute less. Most of my contributions have been related to a work project that needs this or that fixed upstream. That would have been impossible previously, since we had a big steaming pile of shitty Ant code that had been written from scratch. No upstreaming fixes for that because it had very minimal dependencies.
I am a dev but I always find it hard to get into the code of opensource projects so I am never able to contribute. I hope I can understand how to figure this one day.
Its also horrible lacking in most projects (cough Lemmy)
Sadly, I've contributed docs to some projects only to have the devs delete it. They profited off of their hosting solution, so the wanted it to be unclear how to self host it
If using open source projects and sharing my experience by helping others on forums and logging detailed bugs when I find them counts as contribution, then everyday.
I'm a software dev myself, but I have enough on my plate with my day job and two kids that have to be taken to all manner of activities. I don't know how all these people find the time to work on free software, probably for little to no compensation, but my hat is off to all of you, wherever you are.
I rarely find a situation where I need a feature that doesn't exist that's important enough to me to implement it myself. It's a heck of a lot easier to just, for example, purchase things that already work with an existing home assistant integration.
I suppose I could contribute with bug fixes and such, but I have a lot of hobbies that I'm already busy with, and I do development work as my main job.
Sometimes, Issues in software that I'm interested. I don't code, just very simple shell scripting. For that reason I have a GitHub account, and other one in Gitlab that I did for just 1 project.
Existing established open source projects? Basically never.
My own piles of shit with open source licenses? All the time.
Same here; also I once sent vim, the FreeBSD Foundation, & Thunderbird $5 each.
Similar. But I do contribute by adding things I want to some projects I use if it's simple enough.
And my pile of shit has like 40 stars, so maybe I have one or two other users besides me.
Daily. It's my job.
Lucky bastard!
(Thank you 😉 )
It's more common than you might think. A lot of companies have open source codebases. In fact, I think almost every software engineer job I've had so far have had at least a little public code.
That has been somewhat my experience too, but it's rare to find somebody working on such code every day. It's enviable to me.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
NC is not for code. Its literally the cancer that prevents people from being able to have a job developing FOSS
No, they're doing it for their comment, not suggesting others use it for code. It's the new take on "I do not give Facebook permission to use..." trend that went on years ago.
Unless there is a signature option i asssume doing it by hand also. Its like 3x retro.
I try to contribute as much info as I can to Open Street Map on my walks.
Same I’m mapping out my community and adding missing locations
I've been loving it. Weirdly scratches the same itch Pokémon Go did for a while, plus it's something actually useful.
Now you've got the idea of making a game around filling out open street map info. I'll add it too the list of "cool programs I don't have nearly enough time to make" 😔
oh boy do i have news for you
Is there an app that makes this easier to do? I want to contribute but I don't see a setting or option in osmand
Have you heard of StreetComplete on Android?
Nope I haven't! Thanks for the link!
StreetComplete is the one I use, although there's a handful. It's on both the play store and Fdroid
Awesome, thank you!
[email protected] has couple of post about apps
I use street complete, every door, and vespucci depending on what I want to map
Ah ok, thanks!
104 contributions in last year on codeberg, 52 contributions on github (some are duplicated from codeberg due to mirroring), some more in other places.
I like to think that using FOSS daily, singing its praises to everyone and filing out the occasional bug report counts.
It does. I wish more people recognized that bug reports are contributions.
Probably only 1% of users file bug reports. That means for every 100 times a bug is found by a user, 99 of them won't bother reporting it. Devs can't fix a bug they dont know about...
I think it depends on the project. Some maintainers really only want extremely comprehensive bug reports that realistically only another dev could produce. All kinds of logs, sometimes requiring special packages installed to produce them.
Which makes sense because someone just saying "it crashes sometimes" doesnt provide much to go on.
No it doesnt XD
Going to time and effort to help improve something = contributing
Absolutely love others testing my code for me because they find things I would've never run into myself
I'm using StreetComplete to contribute to OpenStreetmap almost daily.
Does that count?
Yes!
Same here, there is tons of work to be done
code: null, nada, nothing. dunno how issues: maybe 30 in 9 years using gnu/linux money: 1% of my income for 5 years now, to whatever project i find cool, mostly smaller ones tho
Mine also look like that.
The reason is that my obsidian vault sync to a private repo.
@const_void every time i think i can help a project with a feature i need
My job is contributing to the building of an open source project full of shared tools and resources for businesses in my industry to share. I am part of a team of skilled developers and citizen developers across my industry that work to create shared FOSS tools to make all of us more efficient at our work.
So about 60 hours per week.
Do you get paid decently to do this?
I make a 6-figure salary. I should specify that the tools and software I help create are used by data analysts. I am treated in my company like a data engineer.
And how do I find a job like that?
I sort of lucked into it. I have worked in IT my entire life outside of a couple years where I worked as a server in a restaurant. I also have a 2 year degree in software dev. I left a large company where I did travelling IT repair services for business and private homes to work at a small company as just a standard help desk style technician. I have a tendency to look for inefficiencies in my day to day work and I write scripts to remove those tasks from my day and then I share them with my team. I also have a strong background in cyber security (from personal studying) and infrastructure/DevOps from my own personal projects and home study. So I started getting brought in for infrastructure and cyber security discussions and meetings as a resource. Over the last X years the company has doubled in size and they created a data department and they needed someone to help build out not just the software but the server architecture, CICD workflows, deployment strategies and data ontology. Because I have a proven track record at this company of being able to pick up new topics fast, as well as have shown the motivation to self study on nights and weekends, they approached me for this new role and I took it. And here I am.
Why did you switch from Infrastructure to Data?
The opportunity to expand my skill set, while still doing some infrastructure and DevOps presented itself, so I took it. It's been a challenge. It's a different thought process, but I enjoy being uncomfortable and I enjoy being the noob in the group. I enjoy the process of going from noob to expert.
I hope to one day, but I don't have any programming skills to speak of
There are many ways to contribute. I actually read an article about that a couple of days ago, maybe it will be of interest to you, too: https://github.com/readme/featured/open-source-non-code-contributions
I actually want to learn enough code to contribute, but there's this gap between "how to code" and "how to participate in a modern software project".
Like, I've created plenty of little things. Discord bots, automation scripts, plenty of sysadmin stuff for work, etc. But like, I clone a git repo cause there's a home assistant bug I'd like to fix for example, and I'm immediately lost on where to start.
I dont know how to code but i have made contribs on repos. For documentation and stuff.
Some repos are very complex and some are simple. It is typically roughly corrolated to size: larger projects = more complex. And then it depends on the language/platform/toolchain being used. Some of them can be very ellaborate. If you dont typically work on that kind of project the set up can be very difficult as you are starting from scratch with dependencies, might need dev versions, can be a whole thing.
Also there are some things which are organizational choices made by the maintainers. A couple of times i was unable to contribute to docs because they werent seperated from the rest of the project and just to edit markdown files you had to install a whole dev toolchain and who knows what. I gave up before getting anywhere. Whereas others have different components segregated nicely.
Then there is quality control stuff having to do with testing, formating and such. You might only find out about that once you've got through everything else and time comes to make a PR.
Start out by using git and github or alternative for yourself to learn the basics. Then pick a smaller, explicitly beginer friendly project to make some minor contributions. Something with a few maintainers and regular contributions from others is generally a good balance. Look for an updated CONTRIBUTING file or equivilant section in the documentation.
I think making a few markdown contribs first is probably advisable even for programers because most of the time it is more simple.
I can't code either but I'm supporting new users in selected forums on a daily basis and I volunteer at our local linux event once a year.
Its practically been all my free time in the past 14 years
☝️ the Man
My main hobby is designing and programming embedded devices, and anything I create gets slapped up on my github in case anyone else can use it. Schematics, code, whatever.
I have a side hustle of selling the PCBs I make, but I have absolutely no problems with someone making a clone of my designs. It's not like they're super advanced tech. Anyone can figure out what I've figured out.
Since for the most part i still suck at programming; i help translating programs in my main language since i needed to learn english for my job regardless.
Good on ya
As much as I can. I can't code at all and don't work in IT, but at least I try to help newcomers as much as I can, publish my work as OS license, try to heat up as much traffic as I can on Lemmy (especially for non-tech stuff) and report bugs whenever I find them.
I can't do much more :(
I donate ~30$ a month divided over a few projects but I want to donate more once I can and also to bigger things that would donate for me to many projects and not just the ones that I think of (please give suggestions to such projects or foundations!)
I think thats called taxes!
There should be more government funding for floss. Both by prioritizing floss projects to use and direct funding to projects that arent useful to govts.
True, but until then
At the moment never.
TL;DR: I am an open source hipster, because "you probably haven't heard of" my work, but I think it's pretty keen.
Every year, around Christmas I donate to a project that I use a lot. Also some projects more than once (wikipedia, Signal)
I'd guess about monthly to bimonthly, in the sense of submitting a fix for an issue that affects/concerns me/my use of open source projects.
Whenever I can. Currently I‘m a bit short on change so I just contribute work. Did some translations, filed bugs, raised awareness and helped others use open source software. I also try to learn to code good enough to fix things in projects but I‘m not there yet.
I write a lot of my own software and open source it. And very few of those projects ever have/get any contributions from anyone else. In fact, most of the recent ones literally only have one commit out on Gitlab. And it's pretty rare that I contribute to existing open source projects.
Many years ago, I contributed as part of my job a fair amount to a some WYSIWYG documentation writing web app associated with the Gentoo project. I think that web app is long-since dead and gone. (Not my fault, I promise. Lol.)
Oh, also, I wrote a lot of code as part of the same job that I was always promised would be open sourced, but I kindof had to leave without pushing that issue and that code hasn't ever been open sourced. It's bullshit that still bothers me today, but there's nothing really that I can do about it now. The place is out of business. I could theoretically contact the guy who was in charge (he would have inherited all of that company's intellectual property and would have the right to open source it now), but that guy's the kind of person I'd much rather never have any contact with again. It's a whole thing.
Since then, nothing concrete I can think of.
Monthly donations and code once in a while when I run into a bug or require a feature and have time.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Semi-regularly.
I fairly often send patches for small bug fixes and features. I also maintain a few packages in nixpkgs. I also forked an abandoned project to provide some fixes and updates, so I maintain that now.
I also try to give a donation to an open-source project that I use every couple of months.
I also have a bunch of my own projects that I released as open source, but I don't think that is really what the question is asking.
I've created one project that no one uses. I've found a lot of friction contributing to existing projects. There has to be:
Then I have to make sure to learn their code of conduct and do it exactly the way they want. Do they want testing? Do they want me to update the docs? So I have to get green light from maintainer to start? Etc.
I've created/maintain 5 programs for this rather niche but rather popular Linux based tablet. All of my programs exist to give the owners more freedom with their device and gives users a plausible way to avoid uploading all of their data to the company's cloud. I created installation scripts but also packed the programs into the community package manager. The programs are all feature complete so I hop on every other week or so for basic maintenance and to test how my programs work after the tablet updates. I'm pretty much always around to help users troubleshoot.
Past that I have a few random contributions to OSS I use for bugs I've identified and have been able to fix.
As often as a I can.
About 35.0% of my waking life is contributing to FOSS.
Mostly its filing bug reports. Sometimes I write my own code
Not often but I have a moment where I do. Last year I contributed a plugin for MusicBrainz Picard which allows you to submit your genre tags to MusicBrainz. I want to give it a proper good update in the future but I'm so focused on other things right now.
Almost daily to the Jellyfin Roku client.
Come join us if you want to work on some cool crap!
Thank you very much, I've been noticing it's been getting a lot of good little updates recently
Yeah, we altered our releases so we could get bug fixes out quicker - separate from features.
In fact, 2.0.5 is scheduled for release tomorrow 🤘
cool crapfree software😊 I've heard it both ways. 🍍
At least weekly.
I used to contribute more when I was at a job where I was unsatisfied. Python was my first language that I really enjoyed writing, regardless of the occasional warts. There are other many other languages I enjoy. Instead, the job had me writing shitty Ant code when I could write code. So I would contribute to OSS projects in my spare time. Now that I'm at a job where my creative juices get flowing on a regular basis, I contribute less. Most of my contributions have been related to a work project that needs this or that fixed upstream. That would have been impossible previously, since we had a big steaming pile of shitty Ant code that had been written from scratch. No upstreaming fixes for that because it had very minimal dependencies.
Problem for me is I'll write code in computercraft or Garry's mod when I'm bored like that which isn't really of any help to anyone
Practically every day.
Don't do NixOS kids...
I am a dev but I always find it hard to get into the code of opensource projects so I am never able to contribute. I hope I can understand how to figure this one day.
Data for open street map, open voice, open assistant, some translation issues, bug reports, and small bug fixes
So I would say couple things a month
Probably too often
i made two issues and a small pull request once, haven't donated money to any foss yet but i should and i will when possible.
If it's something easy to fix or add, worth the time to make a pull request.
Otherwise mostly bug reports and feature requests lol
I've done a few documentation contributions for some projects. Turns out that technical writers and editors are appreciated in certain places.
Its also horrible lacking in most projects (cough Lemmy)
Sadly, I've contributed docs to some projects only to have the devs delete it. They profited off of their hosting solution, so the wanted it to be unclear how to self host it
Only GPL protected code. I mostly create issues and update documentation
Way too often. Maintainers wish I didn't...
Unfortunately never. I'm no Linux programmer and I have no idea how to use that space-shuttle-cockpit-shaped menu for crowd translation
So far, once.
Not good enough :(
Once a year. I usually give half to the same set of orgs and the rest to things I've found useful or inspiring that year.
Like once or twice a year I will open pull requests to libraries I use that have problems or missing features.
A few times a month. I am active with issue reporting and fixes for some Godot extensions and React projects. I've also opened source my own crap.
Most of the time is translations but from time to time is a tiny bit of code.
I mostly write bug reports as my code is not up to par with most projects and my native language is always already translated...
If using open source projects and sharing my experience by helping others on forums and logging detailed bugs when I find them counts as contribution, then everyday.
I'm a software dev myself, but I have enough on my plate with my day job and two kids that have to be taken to all manner of activities. I don't know how all these people find the time to work on free software, probably for little to no compensation, but my hat is off to all of you, wherever you are.
I rarely find a situation where I need a feature that doesn't exist that's important enough to me to implement it myself. It's a heck of a lot easier to just, for example, purchase things that already work with an existing home assistant integration.
I suppose I could contribute with bug fixes and such, but I have a lot of hobbies that I'm already busy with, and I do development work as my main job.
I regularly do bug reports. I would contribute more, but I simply don't have the time.
This but I don't have time or knowledge.
A few times per year. Mostly janitorial work.
Sometimes, Issues in software that I'm interested. I don't code, just very simple shell scripting. For that reason I have a GitHub account, and other one in Gitlab that I did for just 1 project.
Never. The few times I've tried the community was just too toxic.