33
votes
Accepted
How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?
what is the best way to go about being an active, influential FOSS contributor?
The two goals I bolded that you seem to be asking about are quite different.
Many open source projects start because ...
- 1,906
21
votes
What are the benefits of having a benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) on OSS?
I would say that projects having a BDFL ultimately trust the vision of the project to one person, as opposed to design by committee.
You can refer to the list of BDFLs.
Many of the individuals listed ...
- 1,906
20
votes
Accepted
What are the benefits of having a benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) on OSS?
I've always seen the BDFL model as halfway between a traditional open-source project structure and a traditional corporate project structure. You have the openness, transparency, and general culture ...
- 921
19
votes
How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?
Most FLOSS projects are a kind of meritocracy: those who contribute(d) a lot, they have a say. The well-known projects are not new projects and especially the maintainers often work on them for many ...
- 12k
14
votes
How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?
Be more of a team player. Comments like
There's always an "in" group that's running things about how the project works and aren't accepting of new ideas and innovations even if they are backed up ...
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13
votes
How to handle a pattern of GitHub volunteers wanting to work on an issue then disappearing
Congratulations! The problem you face is a common one for a popular open source project.
IMHO, beginners should above all learn to communicate!
So you could explain in your CONTRIBUTING file what a ...
- 14.8k
12
votes
Accepted
Should I require that new issues be written in English?
Open-source maintenance is often volunteer work. As a volunteer, you do not owe your time to anyone and can always say “no”. So it is absolutely legitimate to close any issue that is not ...
- 39.4k
8
votes
How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?
I'm a maintainer in various projects in GitHub with ~50 million weekly downloads but I am one person and can only share what worked for me.
Persistence.
The number one mistake I see people get is ...
7
votes
What do open source software maintainers do?
Take a look at slide 6 of the talk I gave yesterday at the "Opportunity of Open Source" event in Ghent: http://www.slideshare.net/blowagie/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized-66599367
...
- 4,586
6
votes
Accepted
What do open source software maintainers do?
It may be easier to think about this in a negative sense, i.e. what are the responsibilities of someone who contributes to a project but isn't a maintainer?
If I submit a patch to someone else's ...
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6
votes
Accepted
How to handle a pattern of GitHub volunteers wanting to work on an issue then disappearing
EDIT: while the content of this answer may still be interesting, the limitation of GitHub that is discussed is no longer relevant, as this is now possible to assign an issue to anyone who comments it.
...
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6
votes
cooperative work between opensource project and commercial projects
Typical solutions on the market are the following:
The opensource version is public, anybody can download and use it - but the extra features of the closed project is only distributed as modules/...
- 1,006
5
votes
Should I require that new issues be written in English?
In my eyes the best option is indeed the last option. You could use labels to indicate the language of the issue and encourage other people to translate these issues.
Some issues can be translated by ...
- 151
5
votes
How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?
Many good things have been written already in previous answers. One alternative that hasn't been mentioned yet: you can always fork a project.
You are unlikely to get anywhere forking a large project ...
- 413
5
votes
Software becoming open source
To start with the licensing side, to make a project open-source does not require a transfer of intellectual property. Making a project open-source is just changing the terms under which the software ...
- 33.4k
5
votes
Accepted
How long to wait until the contributors will make a PR
Putting together a PR may take time, especially if this is the first time someone contributes to this project (or to open source at all, for that matter!). I'd give a grace period of at least a week ...
- 5,182
4
votes
Opensource projects using JIRA?
Sonatype
Jira for Issues: https://issues.sonatype.org/
Nexus OSS: https://github.com/sonatype/nexus-public
JFrog
Jira for issues: https://www.jfrog.com/jira
Code on GitHub: https://github.com/jfrog
- 151
4
votes
Opensource projects using JIRA?
The WildFly project uses both JIRA (https://issues.jboss.org/projects/WFLY/issues) and GitHub (https://github.com/wildfly )
- 41
4
votes
Accepted
How can an open-source project share web site ownership?
You've already realised that digital credentials are the easy part of the problem to solve. They can be held by multiple people, each of whom can then perform authoritative activites with them. ...
- 53k
4
votes
Accepted
First release of OSS project
The wikipedia page "Release early, release often" (quoted below) explains this adequately, based on the 25 year old essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond, that ...
- 3,307
4
votes
Advertising a job in open source software and hardware
There are some job boards focused on open source:
fossjobs.net (the website itself is open source, too!)
opensourcejobhub.com
fossfox.com
Just for completeness, I'll also mention a couple such ...
- 337
3
votes
Software becoming open source
A Github code search for campwoodsw.com has 200 results. Some of those results are people that have developed custom processes/tools which rely on SourceMonitor, and so are people could/should be ...
- 184
3
votes
Are there cases where not releasing code history led to failure?
The oVirt project originated as closed source product that belonged to a company called Qumranet, before Qumranet was bought by Red Hat, and its closed assets were opened. oVirt's two main components, ...
- 5,182
3
votes
A worldwide software todo list
In my experience all the best free software comes from a developer scratching his/her own personal itch. It's really unlikely, on a planet with several billion people, that you're the only person ...
- 53k
2
votes
How can I convert users to contributors?
People contribute to an opensource project because of either career or need. On the other side, a project get contribution when it has well known by its users and it welcomes contributors.
First ...
- 183
2
votes
How does one structure a C# OSS project to be accessible to wide ranging group of developers?
Visual Studio is both backwards and forwards incompatible, so everybody in the project has to use the same version, if somebody uses a newer version, it breaks support in the project file for ...
- 5,556
2
votes
How does one structure a C# OSS project to be accessible to wide ranging group of developers?
One approach is NOT to commit any IDE settings and setting files, and use for instance with Cmake to generate these and setup a Ci for building with Cmake (to keep things in check and avoid drift of ...
- 14.8k
2
votes
What are Agile methodologies of project management that work on open source projects?
I think that open source is irrelevant, but a team distributed by space and time is relevant. Test first would be a good thing to do.
Test first has the attitude that you are never more than a few ...
- 1,038
2
votes
What do open source software maintainers do?
What are the general things that open source software maintainers do? Is it just another word for project leaders?
It is just another word for project leader. You have been using open source software ...
- 14.8k
2
votes
Is the entire beta/release candidate process of open source projects mostly just "for show"?
I'm not sure this question is going to survive the community much longer, but I personally think it contains a genuine question that admits of an answer.
PHP8 isn't in any major distro yet (that I'm ...
- 53k
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