
Ask HN: How to contribute to OSS? - conqrr
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.
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stephenr
My 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.

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lordxenu
Not 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".

