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Ask HN: How to contribute to OSS?
I am a professional RoR developer for past two years. I never spent any time contributing to Open Source. However I would like to start with now. I am looking for populart projects where I could start contributing easily. No preference for any language.
- stephenr 10y agoMy advice would be to find a project you use enough to be familiar with what it does and vaguely how it works, and try to help. You could start out by trying to reproduce reported bugs/issues. Report your results back to the issue tracker. Then, (if you reproduced the issue) if you're able to, try to track down the cause of the issue. If you find the source of the issue, you can either report it to the maintainers (i.e. if its a language you're not comfortable enough to fix it yourself) or, if you can fix it yourself, (and TEST it after!) and then either send a patch, create a pull request, etc.
- lordxenu 10y agoNot sure if this matters to you, but keep in mind that there is a chance that "Open Source" projects can become closed source, taking all of the user's work with them. Users don't get as much protections as one would get from a free licensed project. ie, there's a difference between "free software" and "open source".