Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source projects?

Yes, although mostly in small, incremental ways.

I try to use entirely free and open source software on my personal laptop (and I'm fortunate enough that my work environment is fairly similar too).

When I encounter some kind of annoying issue, I'll take a look at the code that caused the problem (and sometimes the components that it interacts with), and if there's a way to improve the situation then I'll consider putting together at least an issue report.

In practice the time and thought required to write a code-level description of the problem can sometimes be 90% of the work to develop a fix, so frequently the issue report is followed swiftly by a patch / pull request / merge request.

Review, merge and release can all take time - at various points I've had over twenty changes pending to more than ten separate projects.

It's extremely satisfying and encouraging to wake up or check your email and be reminded about some kind of nagging bug/problem that you encountered months or even years ago and to hear that it's now solved for you and anyone else who would have run into the same issue in future.

A suggestion, although everyone can learn in their own way: consider treating open source contributions the same way that you might do for small tickets or tasks at work.

Valid reasons for me are: particular interest in a project, desire to learn a language/technique/framework, genuine and intrinsic interest in a community and the open source movement.

Certainly not as much as I used to, but yes I contribute to open source projects. It's a combination of making things I'm interested in, drive by patches for tools that almost do what I want or have a bug that I've managed to trigger, and chatting with others building things they're interested in. Being a maintainer is a different ballgame than contributing to a project without the long term responsibility, though both can scratch an itch and help develop new skillsets while helping to create new pieces of software.

I use FOSS in my personal computing needs which heavily intersects with my professional interests. Using 3rd party (FOSS) exposes me to bugs, issues with documentation, problems running things on esoteric hardware, security issues, eventually performance issues. Because of this I often need feedback from maintainers and I'm at their mercy for how fast my issue is resolved.

Supplying a patch, giving feedback for issues, is the least I can do to give back to the people who took the time to write that code.

Because some projects I contribute to are also relevant in my day job I get a deeper insight into that part. Money/financial aspects do not play into that decision but I'd be twisting the truth if I didn't admit the positive impact FOSS had to my career.

Having contributed to FOSS projects in a public way also says something about the person I'm interviewing. If most of my stack is built on FOSS and an applicant comes along with a cool CV but has not one contribution to a single project it's immediately a hard pass from me. I never put applicants through silly technical screening sessions unless they are fresh outta university. But no public commits are a red-flag for senior engineers.

I'm lucky enough to work for an employer that defaults to open. The project I'm working on right now is open source.

It's useful to do components independently as open source, to make sure they work in any context, then integrate them into your main project. This makes both of them better products.

I have made PRs to patch bugs I find on projects that I have used in production applications. Sadly that is as much as I have done, I would love to contribute more but I'm so burned out from work I don't have the energy to do more outside of it.

I try to contribute fixes/features I want and think make sense to upstream as much as I can, on projects I'm using either for myself or at work. I've mostly worked for companies that recognise it's worth the extra time to get a patch in a good state to upstream/do the docs/PR properly to avoid being forced to use a fork.

There are many ways to contribute to Open Source projects, depending on the project and what sort of contributions, if any, it is open to. There are financial contributions, bug reports, feedback, a thank you / letting the project maintainers know how you use the project, promoting the project to others, documentation improvements, code improvements, helping with infrastructure, verifying bug reports... its not just coding, and some of these you may be able to do with little or no time involved. All are forms of contribution. Not all Open Source projects are open to all of these, some aren't open to any of them (except perhaps promotion). So it is best to get familiar with the project by checking the site, docs, trackers, etc or maybe reaching out to the maintainers if you still have questions before jumping in.

I do it a few times a year because many open-source softwares have glaring bugs. This is true in the JS/TS world, at least.

I don't know how you can avoid doing it at all, unless you're just messily working around issues in your codebase or leaving a TODO or item in the backlog to fix it in the distant future. (Which can be a better use of time sometimes of course.)

I have contributed work I've done in the context of paid employment. Very very occasionally I do so outside of work (maybe I use a tool at home, it doesn't work properly for what I want, I patch it and send a PR upstream).

My motivation to do so is if everyone puts in just a little bit of extra effort to contribute upstream we can get many people making small patches. It's nice for a contributor to see folks care (as opposed to just complaining of issues).

My motivation has usually been to add features/fixes that *I* would consider useful for my particular use cases, and most times it's for software I use in my personal time or personal projects.

Expecting to get paid for your first contributions to open source sounds, to me, like the wrong motivation.

Yes by using them thereby giving the developers reason to get out of bed.

More seriously; no. The license gives no warranty for the software, or potential issues I encounter. If the developer would take more professional responsibility there, I might feel like funding or contributing somehow. But if their approach is this is free stuff no strings, my approach is freely take and provide no guarantees in return.

I make incidental contributions, usually of the form of fixes to bugs I encounter or extensions of function that I need.

My motivation is saving others the ass-ache I just went through. There’s no reason in my mind that I should have a fix and not share it, especially after all of the lift/savings I've gotten over the years from emacs, Linux, apache, svn, git, etc.

I used to but the number of projects I use that enforce CLAs is ever increasing and I don't want to run to a lawyer every time I open a PR. My employers have been more than happy for me to contribute but lawyers aren't free (and I haven't worked somewhere with staff lawyers, yet).

I would really like to, but I've only had time when it's necessary for my full-time work.

..sort of. I'm sure I could make time if I were determined enough, but it's hard to feel good about spending 8+ hours working in front of a screen, then spending more hours working in front of a screen for free. It's probably more of a mental + physical health concern than anything else.

When I worked as an employee I contributed mostly just with docs fixes or bug reports (and not that often). I think it's mostly a mindset of seeing an issue yourself and noticing that others probably also are confused or misled by something so you go and report it!

Now that I'm working full-time on open-source and my own company I can contribute more easily to projects like upgrading SQLite source in a few bindings libraries [0], [1], [2] when 3.38 came out.

If anyone is interested in contributing to open-source and wants a bit more guidance though I have a number of good "first timer" projects related to data tooling for [3]. Only expectation is that you have some experience with Go. Join discord.multiprocess.io, go to the #dev channel and say hi!

[0] https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3/pull/1019

[1] https://github.com/mapbox/node-sqlite3/pull/1550

[2] https://github.com/JoshuaWise/better-sqlite3/pull/778

[3] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation

I make things because I need them, and I open source them because it's a nice thing to do.

Ask your employer if you can submit documentation or a patch to a project if you notice a bug. It's unlikely they would say no as long as it contains no proprietary information. You can give them a whole pitch about how open source is free software that somebody else maintains, and that you contributing a fix is much cheaper than you having to maintain your own private patches and apply and fix them every time the software is changed upstream. It's saving them time and money. It also gives your company a better reputation among hackers, making it easier to hire good people.

I am building an open source web framework comparison. It is aimed at experienced developers who want to get a quick overview of how the current web framework landscape looks like. My intention is to make it a long-running project that will be an up-to-date reference point at any time in the future.

The idea is to put together a project that gives an overview of how to set up a minimal viable web application from scratch via all the different frameworks.

For each framework the project features a self-explanatory shell script that builds a web app with routing, templates and user accounts. So there is no ambiguity of how to reproduce the results. And it is even possible to just copy&paste the steps into a fresh Linux installation, see the framework in action and build your own application on top of it.

The scripts have one part for every aspect like routing, templates, accounts. So if you want to compare how the frameworks do templating, you can look at the "Let's use templates" part and have a quick overview of how it is done in Django, Laravel, Flask, Symfony, NextJS...

So far, 5 developers have joined and contributed. Django and Flask are complete. Laravel and Symfony have routing and templates but no user accounts yet. I wonder if this distribution of contributions across the frameworks is somehow telling about their ecosystems?

Here is the repo:

https://github.com/no-gravity/web_app_from_scratch

I started an opensource project to solve a problem I was facing at the time. I continue to develop the project alongside another core maintainer. It's a rewarding process. We aren't beholden to any project managers or deadlines - we just hack on what we feel like, when we feel like it.

I contribute to Our World In Data [0] and some of the Rails repos. I also run my own open source projects [1][2].

I've just recently started doing it, and I only put in a few hours each week. Slow and steady wins the race. My motivation is three-fold: First, it's gratifying to give something back to software I love using for free. Second, I learn a lot. Third, if I ever want to work with one of the companies who are stewarding these repos, it gives me a leg up in the application process.

0: https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher

1: https://github.com/shafy/fugu

2: https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy

Like everyone else i rely on open source libraries. I sometimes need to change them either to fix bugs that i encounter or to improve them in some way to better fit my purposes.

It is in my best interest to send my changes to the library maintainer so that i do not have to maintain my own fork of the library.

It is not always in best interest of maintainers to merge my changes because it is either more work for them or their purposes for the library are too different from mine.

Maintaining an open source project is a lot of work and i would also like to hear more from maintainers about their motivation to do it.

>> What is your motivation for doing such things?

I've used open source whenever possible for a long time but never "gave back". It was a matter of finding the right thing to contribute to. When I found and used SolveSpace, I loved the tool but found it a bit limited in capability. Looking at the dates on the repository I found that the areas I thought needed work hadn't been touched in at least 2 years. Then I realized if I wanted it to be better it's my job to make it so. It's still the only project I really contribute to, but there are a couple others I may get involved in at some point. I no longer have a lot of time for programming as a hobby, so I view this as me doing volunteer work. It's a bit of responsibility I've decided to take on at least as much as it is a fun thing.

Your reasons for doing and your choice of project will be your own.

>What is your motivation for doing such things

I use Linux and most s/w I've installed are free and open source. Also, not software as such, but I've benefitted a lot from free programming learning resources.

So, I try to pay it forward similarly by answering questions on stackoverflow/reddit/etc, giving away free copies of my ebooks, open sourcing s/w I've written, promoting open source, etc.

See also: https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/ - section 4 has handy links to find projects

I have, but I barely do it at all because I have too many of my own projects to work on, and deciphering someone else's codebase isn't a good use of my time for the kinds of minor problems I'd be solving that someone else could solve better.