Existing established open source projects? Basically never.
My own piles of shit with open source licenses? All the time.
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Same here; also I once sent vim, the FreeBSD Foundation, & Thunderbird $5 each.
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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.
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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.
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I'm using StreetComplete to contribute to OpenStreetmap almost daily.
Does that count?
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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.
So about 60 hours per week.
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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.
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Its practically been all my free time in the past 14 years
☝️ the Man
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 :(
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
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!)
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At the moment never.
- I have commits accepted to major projects you have heard of. Mainly because I have no patience for a poorly worded README.
- I co-maintain a couple of mildly popular things you almost certainly haven't even heard of.
- I solely maintain a half dozen utilities that are only used by myself and some brave souls who randomly found them on GitHub.
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)
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.
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.
Monthly donations and code once in a while when I run into a bug or require a feature and have time.
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.
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.
Almost daily to the Jellyfin Roku client.
Come join us if you want to work on some cool crap!
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About 35.0% of my waking life is contributing to FOSS.
Mostly its filing bug reports. Sometimes I write my own code
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.
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.
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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.
As often as a I can.
Practically every day.
Don't do NixOS kids...
At least weekly.
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
I try to contribute as much info as I can to Open Street Map on my walks.
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Probably too often
No such thing as too often :)
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 made a few code contributions, but most of the time I'm working on my own (also libre) projects or procrastinating.
I'm also a member of the FSF so I guess those membership dues also count?
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