[TOS] The "How to contribute to FOSS" Document is Mostly Finished

[Gregory Hislop]

I agree with Dave Neary's comment and would also note that many of the people involved in this list and the TOS site are instructors interested in teaching student about FOSS.  Some students find FOSS on their own and fall into the "itch to scratch" category.  But many students we want to reach are going to have involvement with FOSS because it's a class requirement.  For that population, discussion of finding a project to contribute to is very much on target.

Cheers,

Greg Hislop

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Dave Neary
Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2010 5:31 AM
To: Kenneth Gonsalves
Cc: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: Re: [TOS] The "How to contribute to FOSS" Document is Mostly Finished

Hi Kenneth,

Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
> In my experience, and from observation I
> find that sustained long term contributors to a project almost
> invariably come from people who start out as users of the project/app.

<snip>

I agree with your characterisation of things for "volunteer" (for lack
of a better word) developers.

However, there is a large & growing number of free software developers
who do not discover free software projects like this, and that is
professional software developers. We should also (I would say
*especially*, since I'm not too worried about the people who organically
discover projects) cater to them.

The things which we should be educating people about are:
For managers/executives:
 * Before deciding to build on a free software component, how do you
evaluate the health of the community?
 * The cost/benefit analysis of maintaining a delta in the case of:
  1. Branching off stable (read: old) versions of software & fixing it
to suit your needs
  2. Branching off the latest version of the software & fixing it to
suit your needs
  3. Working in the community to have your needs addressed in the
upstream software

For developers:
 * How to get over a fear of mailing lists (the number of professional
developers I know who are not comfortable with written English is
frightening - and that includes native speakers!)
 * OK so I have to work on this stuff... how do I get patches upstream?
 * People in glasshouses... How to develop a feature in the open without
having design by committee/bikeshed discussions/stop energy.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary at gnome.org
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