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In my experience, I rely heavily on what I consider "Open Source Karma". There are a handful of projects that I use very frequently and my entire (geospatial) i

by rburhum 14y ago

In my experience, I rely heavily on what I consider "Open Source Karma". There are a handful of projects that I use very frequently and my entire (geospatial) industry relies on. For every single one of those, I contribute something. examples are: - I maintain an open window to the IRC channel, lurk, and help when possible ( I can go weeks without doing this, too) - Contribute a single line patch to fix something minor - Contribute a 1000+ lines of new functionality when I understand the internals. - Subscribe to the mailing list and spend 3 seconds everyday scanning through that daily digest titles to see if there is something I can comment on that may be helpful. - Do a presentation about that technology in conferences/meet ups/hackathons/whatever. - Sometimes even volunteer to spend a few hours helping with a booth of that project in a local conference. - Watch the Github repo and comment/help with bug reports submissions - Submit bug reports What do I get in return? Putting aside the amazing conversations I have with people far smarter than I and the unusual/rewarding friendships/connections I have made, my Open Source Karma there is off the hook. I get a level of support that cannot be bought. It is the difference between intrinsic/extrinsic motivators. In the past, I have run into issues that I have been trying to solve myself for days. Then I just went over to IRC to ask for help and in less than 10 minutes I had a patch with a fix/workaround from one of the core maintainers who personally debugged my problem and fixed it. There is no typical commercial paid support package that will get you that. This is exactly why the project health of an open source component is measured in community size/involvement. If you do something minor to give back, you will get your bug fixed because there are real people behind those projects. Meanwhile, the douchebag that demands his bug gets fixed because there is some "implied responsibility to support your package because you are the father of that project" will get ignored.

caseysoftware 14y ago
As the lead to a pair of open source projects - Web2Project and OpenVBX - I sincerely appreciate people who keep an eye on the lists/forums and respond to the basic/101-level questions. Because of efforts like that, I can focus on the deeper or higher level problems or questions that come up. If you ever find yourself in Austin, TX or at a Twilio event, let me know. I'll happily buy you a tasty beverage as gratitude. :)
- rburhum 14y ago
  As somebody that consumes OS like a maniac, thank you! Next time I am in TX I will take you up on that offer :)
felixge 14y ago
+100 to this. Whenever I get a bug report, I check the users Github profile. I spend much more time helping people who are also contributing (to any project, not just mine) than those with no apparent track record.
sebs303 14y ago
I guess the whole internet and with it the whole economy relies on this small and bigger contribs. We all should be aware that the internet would be a completely different place if it wasn't for all this free tools, made by a lot of smart people. Calculating this as "Karma" is a well known approach as we are used to think of everything as a kind of exchange of "goods" as taught by traditional economic sciences. However, most approaches seem to take a Zero-Sum exchange into account (I give you X lines of code, you give me y Karma). I think in terms of OS and all the things that come with it, this is wrong. I like to think of all this as a Non-Zero-Sum game, maybe the biggest experiment in Non-zero-Sum-Games ever concluded. The sum and result of all that tools and libs created is much greater than the amount of Karma that can be handed out. I rarely contribute, but from time to time, I file a bug or fork/pull req. a repo, just because it became a normal behavior. I guess I do this just because I can. Keep your Karma and just take my Pull-Request.
- rburhum 14y ago
  You are interpreting "Karma" in the Reddit/HNs/Whatever-Internet-Social-Site sense. I am not talking about any exchange or point system whatsoever. I mean Karma in the original buddhist definition instead.

by rburhum 14y ago

caseysoftware 14y ago

As the lead to a pair of open source projects - Web2Project and OpenVBX - I sincerely appreciate people who keep an eye on the lists/forums and respond to the basic/101-level questions. Because of efforts like that, I can focus on the deeper or higher level problems or questions that come up. If you ever find yourself in Austin, TX or at a Twilio event, let me know. I'll happily buy you a tasty beverage as gratitude. :)

rburhum 14y ago
As somebody that consumes OS like a maniac, thank you! Next time I am in TX I will take you up on that offer :)

felixge 14y ago

+100 to this. Whenever I get a bug report, I check the users Github profile. I spend much more time helping people who are also contributing (to any project, not just mine) than those with no apparent track record.

sebs303 14y ago

I guess the whole internet and with it the whole economy relies on this small and bigger contribs. We all should be aware that the internet would be a completely different place if it wasn't for all this free tools, made by a lot of smart people. Calculating this as "Karma" is a well known approach as we are used to think of everything as a kind of exchange of "goods" as taught by traditional economic sciences. However, most approaches seem to take a Zero-Sum exchange into account (I give you X lines of code, you give me y Karma). I think in terms of OS and all the things that come with it, this is wrong. I like to think of all this as a Non-Zero-Sum game, maybe the biggest experiment in Non-zero-Sum-Games ever concluded. The sum and result of all that tools and libs created is much greater than the amount of Karma that can be handed out. I rarely contribute, but from time to time, I file a bug or fork/pull req. a repo, just because it became a normal behavior. I guess I do this just because I can. Keep your Karma and just take my Pull-Request.

rburhum 14y ago
You are interpreting "Karma" in the Reddit/HNs/Whatever-Internet-Social-Site sense. I am not talking about any exchange or point system whatsoever. I mean Karma in the original buddhist definition instead.