[TOS] Some Thoughts about a "How to Get Started Contributing to (and Using) FOSS" essay

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Satya,

On Saturday 03 Apr 2010 23:51:02 satyaakam goswami wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 2:08 AM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
> > Hi all!
> > 
> > For the past few days I've been intending to write a document about "How
> > to Get Started Contributing to (and to a lesser extent, Using) Open
> > Source Software". Here are some of my random thoughts about my plans for
> > it.
> 
> how about this list
> 
> http://shakthimaan.com/downloads/glv/presentations/gnubie.html
> 

Here are my comments about it:

1. I see you've used AsciiDoc. I'm fond of it as well and used it for Freecell 
Solver ( http://fc-solve.berlios.de/ ) and other documents, though it's not 
the only lightweight markup language or document format in general that I'm 
using.

2. I think calling the stages "Newborn", "Infant", "Toddler", etc. may be a 
bit condescending. Perhaps it would be better to give a more meaningful 
headline. I think it's kinda cute, so I may be wrong.

3. The presentation format is nice, but I intend to prepare a full length 
prose document instead. I can base my effort on yours, though.

4. It seems like the presentation is focused on contributing to Fedora. 
There's nothing wrong with it, but I would prefer a more generic approach.

5. Likewise, I'm not going to scare newcomers with intimate "GNU Autotools" 
details:

http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/autohell/

Learning how the GNU Autotools suite works, how to use it and how to get help 
fixing it when it breaks, is still a useful skill, but I would recommend 
against using it for newer projects. Moreover, and more importantly, newcomers 
can easily use the custom build systems of the dynamic languages that they are 
developing for (e.g: Perl 5's Module-Build/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/Module-Install , 
Python's disttools and Ruby's rake) without needing to worry about how to 
build code in C, C++ and other languages. At least not until they start 
learning them.

6. In the same vein, why are you instructing them to learn LaTeX? LaTeX is 
mostly useful for creating high-quality PDFs with a lot of maths notation 
and/or perfectly-rendered typesetting. But it's very technical, quirky, easy 
to break, and has poor support for hypertext, Bi-directional scripts and other 
important features. By all means newcomers should learn first HTML/XHTML (see 
http://www.htmldog.com/ for a good tutorial), and then DocBook/XML and 
possibly some lightweight markup languages such as Perl's POD, AsciiDoc or 
markdown - not LaTeX. We are not talking about mathematicians here.

7. I see you eventually recommend people to learn Perl during 6 weeks. I think 
Perl is a good programming language to learn first (though the best first 
introductory language is the topic of much debate):

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/education/introductory-
language/

(sorry for the broken URL)

It's good that you are linking to "Beginning Perl" which is a gratis online 
book with a good reputation, but please also link to http://perl-begin.org/ , 
which is a site I created for Perl beginners with many good links and 
resources. (Which links to that book in several relevant places).

8. I think your schedule is too optimistic. It is likely that people will 
require much more time than that.

9. There isn't enough mental preparation which I've discussed extensively in 
my mailing list post. (e.g: "don't give up", "don't do technology hopping.", 
etc.)

10. Regardless of what I said I think this is overall a good document. 

11. I would give more links for resources for further enlightenment:

	#. The Cathedral and the Bazaar Series. (And other FAQs and HOWTOs by 
ESR - somewhat showing its age, but still good)
	#. "Producing Open Source Software" by Karl Fogel and others.
	#. The Free Software Foundation Philosophy section. (which should be 
taken with a huge grain of salt, but is worth reading)
	#. Some selected essays by Paul Graham.
	#. The "Joel on Software" site.
	#. Maybe some of my stuff - http://www.shlomifish.org/
	#. The Wikipedia Free Software Portal.

We may overwhelm people with all of those, but like I said "there is no royal 
road to mathematics". You need to read and take all that into account if you 
want to make a difference.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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