Ask HN: Why you contribute or don't contribute to open source? - ahacker15
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aaossa
I contribute by dedicating each friday or saturday to open source projects
(not mine). I do this because in CS all of our work depends on another's, and
each time we import a module, visit a website, or use a phone, we KNOW that
another person dedicated part of his life to do that. My contributions are my
"thank you" to every person that gave part of his time to create something
that helped me, creating something like an "open source cycle" where I help
other because someone helped me

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agibsonccc
I'll chime in from the other side as a maintainer of a mid size project at a
foundation (eclipse foundation, 8k stars, 4k forks)

We get a ton of drive by contributions of people scratching their own itch.
That's _most_ of the 3rd party open source contributions out there.

Beyond that, folks I've hired (we're an OSS company) have been grad student
hobbyists that started (and stayed) remotely.

Those have also been my best hires.

I wouldn't feel "guilty" about not contributing to open source. These projects
aren't built for altruistic reasons.

If you want to contribute, do it to learn something and get something out of
it. Make interests align. That keeps it interesting for both parties.

I wouldn't feel "obligated" to do anything as a single developer.

There's only 24 hours in a day, people have kids etc..

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drakonka
I don't really know where to start and I also haven't found a project that has
motivated me enough to really figure out where to start. I know there are some
sites and twitter accounts out there that help open source beginners find
issues to start with, but what I'd really like is a really interesting project
to dig into that _also_ has some good entry level issues I can help with. If
it's not something I am very interested in I tend to just gravitate to working
on my own non-open-source projects. OpenWorm is one that sounds really
interesting. I've donated to the project a while ago and am considering seeing
if it might be something I can contribute to.

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billconan
I contribute to open source a lot, but mostly to my own code bases.

I seldom fix other open source projects, because they are not well documented,
digging other people's code is a pain.

Or some code bases are well documented, and their code is also structured
nicely, but they have a quite complex or bureaucratic procedure to do code
review and submission. I tend to give up in this case and simply file a bug
and point out the problem to them.

I think I should contribute to open source, because I benefit from them a lot.
Every single project I worked on uses open source libraries, frameworks. I
should pay my open source tax to support them.

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djellybeans
Disclaimer: most of my contributions for OSS have been on a paid basis. I
choose to contribute to open source because the projects may have people that
think similarly in terms of approaching problems. It's also a good way to
learn and apply knowledge that impacts other peoples' work instead of your
own.

My contributions are responses to issues that are clearly laid out and have a
clear target spec. Vague issues that have a large number of unknowns are ones
I would be more reluctant in approaching.

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afarrell
I only sporadically contribute because I can rarely block out the focused time
to get myself ramped up in a new project in order to accomplish something
unless it is part of an open source project my employer is maintaining or
contributing to.

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askafriend
I write code professionally for 8-10 hours a day. 5 days a week, sometimes
more.

When I come home and have time for myself, I don't want to write code.

It's as simple as that.

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mbrock
I only work on open source projects, mostly blockchain-related.

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alborzmassah
Why?

