Ask HN: Why you contribute or don't contribute to open source? |
Ask HN: Why you contribute or don't contribute to open source? |
We get a ton of drive by contributions of people scratching their own itch. That's most of the 3rd party open source contributions out there.
Beyond that, folks I've hired (we're an OSS company) have been grad student hobbyists that started (and stayed) remotely.
Those have also been my best hires.
I wouldn't feel "guilty" about not contributing to open source. These projects aren't built for altruistic reasons.
If you want to contribute, do it to learn something and get something out of it. Make interests align. That keeps it interesting for both parties.
I wouldn't feel "obligated" to do anything as a single developer.
There's only 24 hours in a day, people have kids etc..
I seldom fix other open source projects, because they are not well documented, digging other people's code is a pain.
Or some code bases are well documented, and their code is also structured nicely, but they have a quite complex or bureaucratic procedure to do code review and submission. I tend to give up in this case and simply file a bug and point out the problem to them.
I think I should contribute to open source, because I benefit from them a lot. Every single project I worked on uses open source libraries, frameworks. I should pay my open source tax to support them.
My contributions are responses to issues that are clearly laid out and have a clear target spec. Vague issues that have a large number of unknowns are ones I would be more reluctant in approaching.
When I come home and have time for myself, I don't want to write code.
It's as simple as that.