[IndiChix] How to become open source contributor?

[Pradeepto Bhattacharya]

Hi Philip,

         Awesome reply, couldn't have said it better. This by far is
the best post in any list I have seen a long time.  Its very simple
and yet inspiring showcases how many many people got interested and
involved in FOSS.

         Philip, would you be ok if, I copy what you said verbatim and
post it somewhere else with appropriate reference to this mail.
Unfortunately, the list archives are not public, or so I have heard
but haven't checked it personally. So apologies in advance if it is
public already.

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 9:09 PM, Philip Tellis <philip.tellis at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Radha,
>
> Each person has their own way of contributing, so I won't tell you
> what you should do, I'll only recount my own experience in becoming a
> FOSS developer.
>
> Back in 1999, someone sent a mail to the ilug-bom mailing list asking
> how to find out which web server was running on a given host, eg, was
> it Apache, IIS, Netscape, etc.  I sent in instructions to find this
> out using telnet, but then I also realised that it would take not more
> than 30 minutes to write a small program to do it, so I wrote a 10
> line perl script to do it (I was learning perl at the time, so it was
> a good excercise), and called it httptype.  I mailed it to the list,
> and uploaded it to my free web hosting account.  Within a few hours,
> people were giving me suggestions and reporting bugs, so I released a
> new version the next day, and announced it on freshmeat.net.  In a few
> days I was getting patches, and then another person on the list showed
> me how to use sourceforge and CVS (I did not know any of these things
> before), so I did that, and I started getting more patches and feature
> requests and downloads.  It was a lot of fun, but ultimately there's a
> limit to how many useful features you can add to this kind of simple
> program, and it's officially been in a stable and complete state for
> about five years now (ie, no bugs, no maintenance required).  I had
> been bitten by the FOSS development bug (my code was released under
> the GNU GPL), and I started looking for more to do.
>
> In 2001, I started using instant messaging, and was looking for a
> client on linux.  I found something called everybuddy, downloaded the
> tarball, built it and started using it.  I also joined the mailing
> list, and started reporting issues that I found.  The developers were
> very friendly, and explained things to me, but for bugs related to the
> Yahoo! library, I wasn't getting any responses.  So I started reading
> the source code, and using gdb (again, one of the developers showed me
> how to do this), and figured out how to fix some of the smaller bugs
> (1-2 line changes), and I sent in a patch (I learnt how to make
> patches on httptype).  But no one was commenting on the patches or
> merging them into the project.  So one day I just got annoyed and
> asked the project maintainer who the maintainer of the Yahoo! module
> was, and he replied saying, as far as he knew, I was now the
> maintainer.  This was a surprise to me, since I did not even have CVS
> access, so I harassed him a little more and he gave me write access
> (the project was hosted on his personal machine), and I became the
> maintainer of the Yahoo! library of everybuddy.  About a year later I
> was one of the primary developers, and when the team decided to split
> the project into two sub projects, one of the devs from France, and I
> became the lead developers of Ayttm.  During this time, I started many
> more projects of my own, and kept submitting small one or two line
> patches to many more projects (Zope, Squishdot, automake, to name a
> few).
>
> I'm not saying that you need to do the same thing, but maybe it will
> give you an idea of what you can do.  At no point of time was I
> developing open source software as part of my job, this was all stuff
> I did in my free time during my lunch break, or in the evenings, or on
> weekends, or while I was "waiting for my code to compile".
>
> My advice would be, look for one of these two things:
> - Has someone asked a question that you think you can answer through code?
> - Is there a tool that you really like using, but have a few minor
> bugs you would like fixed?
> Ideally, in the latter case, it should be a simple project.  Things
> like Firefox, Thuderbird and Evolution are massive projects that it's
> pretty hard to get into, but there will also be many mentors to show
> you the way.
>
> HTH,
>
> Philip
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>

          Cheers!

Pradeepto
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