We are currently in an age where a large portion of open source apps are actively maintained, users understand more about open source than ever before and open source software is almost as good, if not better, than their proprietary counterparts.
This is just a huge thank you to anyone and everyone involved in the making and maintaining of open source software.
As a regular tester, I do my best to provide any feedback I can to make your vision come to fruition.
I think that one of the structural change that helped a lot to have less stalled or unmaintained open source projects is the improvement in the DevOps tools.
I mean that, until recently, I always had been an open source user and supporter but, despite being a professional software engineer, I never coded in open source projects. The reason to this is that I did not wanted to commit myself into a project that I cannot afford to work regularly on because of professional and/or personal time constraints.
Now with the broad use of git and related platforms for open source projects (GitHub, gitlab, …), it’s possible to work only a little on open source projects. You can fix a bug impacting you as an user, translate some strings in your native language, improve the doc, … without commiting to work regularly on the project. You just change the stuff, have no requirements to inform anyone, make a pull request and it’s merged or not by the maintener …
I think this is really what contributed to improvement in the way open source projects evolved.
🙌 I’d like to give thanks too. It’s because of open source developers, that I was able to learn computer science fundamentals at a young age, without spending a dime. Some contributors have gone out of their way mentoring a pixelated avatar that beamed countries away.
I feel it’s my duty to give back in the same way. If it weren’t for those projects/strangers back then and today I wouldn’t be able to have the skills necessary to turn my absurd thoughts into realities that I can take comfort in.
I am very thankful for Lemmy’s dev teams and this whole experiment around federation overall. As I feel reminded about what truly matters again. And why I got into engineering in the first place.
Some contributors have gone out of their way mentoring a pixelated avatar that beamed countries away.
This is the biggest takeaway here. This community is beautiful and generally speaking, lovely and friendly. Love you guys. ❤️
As an open-source developer and maintainer (and as someone about to open-source another project) and tester too, you’re welcome :)
I enjoy writing and maintaining open-source, it’s fun for others to be able to download and play around with the sources.
Being a maintainer / project owner is not always fun, but it’s rewarding in a sense that you’re able to offer something useful to others.
I don’t like providing free support via github issues. And that’s usually what happens, you don’t get many developers that put care into bug reports. Instead it’s mostly users that don’t really understand, sometimes entitled, sometimes really nice but completely wrong.
However I really appreciate those that do care or at least follow the template and make an effort.
I see issues as a form of a necessity to help the software improve, but I’ve chosen to no longer pay too much attention to it because it’s just draining.
Support is draining, and I respect everyone who does it, those who provide support for free even moreso.
Oh that’s awesome! What stuff have you been involved in? Anything you’d like to share? 🙃
You can check my GitHub https://github.com/ipkpjersi it should have my projects I have contributed to and maintain
Will take a look
Edit: I can’t understand shit but clearly it’s fun stuff 😄
Not everybody can code, so donors giving their hard earned cash also deserve credit, some projects (for example godot ) can hire multiple full time people due to it, and that can include jobs that don’t get a lot of open source contributors like UX people.
Godot is insane. Blender too! These projects make me feel a sense of pride in our community that I don’t really qualify to feel, but these people keep making me feel it anyway.
Well done yo!
I really hope Godot becomes the Blender of game engines in the future
Yes!
There’s this new video editor I saw someone working on. Olive or something I think.
Really amazing progress!
Same with Natron, the FOSS Video Compositing Software, like After Effects.
Plus plus, Penpot, the Figma alternative. I’m waiting for the desktop app.
I’m so pumped for the future of Open Source Projects. 🎉🫠🎉🫠
deleted by creator
I agree. I’m very grateful to OSS developers. I use almost exclusively OSS software every day at this point, and it wouldn’t be possible without the countless people devoting countless hours of their valuable time to these projects.
So, a question to devs, especially for smaller, more approachable projects: I have a minor (plus a bit more) in CS, a lifetime of casual coding, but never really built anything larger-scale than a C-based sh-like shell in one of my CS courses, or many years ago an IRC front-end for a chatbot engine. Mostly I just write scripts (sometimes kinda complex), or small C/C++ projects. I would try to contribute to a project directly, but I don’t want to step on toes, and most projects have people who are deeply intertwined in the code of the project. It feels impossible to get involved in any way other than testing without possibly just annoying people who have been doing it for years. I’ve known enough intimidating grizzled *nix guru people to make me paranoid that I’ll just get in the way.
How do you get a foothold in a project? Should I just start with creating my own OSS project, and once I get somewhere where I’m familiar with the flow and project management and such, then I can consider contributing more to other projects?
Or is it really more helpful to the community to just test stuff, create documentation, answer questions, etc? Would becoming another dev be more helpful to OSS, or would working on supporting projects in these other ways be more helpful?
I have zero coding experience but I’d LOVE to know as well.
