
Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams? - mikemajzoub
Hi HN -<p>I&#x27;m looking to get more involved with open source projects. From your experience, are there any projects that you have been involved with where you are impressed by how kind, supportive, talented, and effective the group of people are that work on the project?<p>Thanks,
Mike
======
unvs
Elixir and its ecosystem (plug, ecto and phoenix) has been above and beyond
every time I've contributed. Helpful, patient and kind, and also very smart
guys.

[https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir](https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir)

[https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug](https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug)

[https://github.com/elixir-lang/ecto](https://github.com/elixir-lang/ecto)

[https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix](https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix)

~~~
phamilton
Last April I decided to work on open source every day for a month. I saw a gap
in the Elixir ecosystem (a driver for RethinkDB) and I just started hacking on
it. The help and feedback I've gotten from the community have been fantastic.
It's a community where I can tag José (the creator of Elixir) on a github
issue for my driver and he'll chime in with very useful feedback. Imagine
pinging Guido or Matz about the right way to do connection pooling and them
responding. It's a pretty awesome community.

------
forgottenpass
Find the projects that speak to you then check in on the communities.
Contributing to open source is first and foremost _work_. A community can turn
you off from participating, but the motivation to contribute only comes from
the product.

And you might be surprised at the difference between what it's like to
contribute to any random project compared to what a "news" blogger that needs
to generate hits wants you to think the average project is like.

~~~
nhaehnle
This is really the correct answer: Why do you want to participate in an open-
source project in the first place?

If it's to gain brownie points for your CV, it's quite likely that you'll get
nowhere, because that's a motivation right along with "earn money".

The difference to just getting a random software development _job_ for earning
money is that at the random job, you will be in a team where tasks will
naturally flow towards you. In a random open source project, this will not be
the case. So most people will not stick with it _unless_ they have a better
motivation for contributing to the project in the first place.

So try to find a project that you find interesting _first_. You should
actually be able to find many of those if you're into software development,
and then take a look at the communities yourself.

~~~
EvanPlaice
This, so much this.

Working on Open Source absolutely requires individual contributors to be self-
starting. New contributors who lack drive require constant direction and/or
hand-holding, undermining the time/effort commitment of existing contributors.

Most Open Source projects invest a lot of time/effort coaching new
contributors. If a new contributor receives the coaching but doesn't produce
anything useful; it's a net loss for the project, users, and community.

I always tell people who want to start contributing to OSS to start with
simple/easy tasks like documentation updates. It minimizes the negative impact
of poor quality contributions and allows existing devs to identify and correct
workflow inconsistencies during peer review.

The other growing pain is new contributors who bring their 'ideas' but put
zero effort toward contributing. 'Ideas' are like assholes, meaning everybody
has one. They're not particularly useful unless there's a person ready/willing
to implement them. Even then, a new idea may not follow the intent of the
project and/or its culture.

Endlessly discussing the 'future possibilities' of a project is extremely
counterproductive and distracting to existing developers.

~~~
sanxiyn
I have somewhat different perspectives on "ideas". People discuss ideas first
because if they do the implementation first, there is a large risk of wasted
effort because it "may not follow the intent of the project". Discussion is in
part effort to divine the intent of the project.

As a concrete example, I implemented break and continue for OCaml compiler
because having for loop without break/continue seems to me obviously a bad
idea. Although I learned a lot about OCaml compiler internals, this went
nowhere. I learned my lesson, and now I will certainly "endlessly discuss"
possibilities of break/continue first, without writing a single line of code.
In my opinion, berating people for this is placing undue burden on
contributors.

[http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-
list/2008/04/ce14d...](http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-
list/2008/04/ce14ded0e6767696945a1aa95576dac0.en.html)

~~~
EvanPlaice
An idea followed by an implementation is awesome and exactly what OSS projects
need from contributors.

"I learned my lesson..."

I read the mailing list and don't see how that was a negative experience. Only
one of the contributors had an unfavorable response.

Even if they don't implement your code as-is, it looks like you had a good
idea including a good implementation that led to a lot of productive
discussion.

Only one of the contributors had a strong objection and despite that, the
conversation continued.

Don't take it personal if your code isn't directly incorporated into a
project. Despite that, your contribution led to further discussion and helped
better focus the intent of the project.

Working on an OSS project is very much about collaboration. Code contributions
may not always be incorporated into the codebase, especially on projects like
ocaml that have a specific focus and changes have far-reaching impacts on the
userbase.

That's not a bad thing. You did well.

~~~
EvanPlaice
:cringe: Apparently I, need to expand the comment text field and re-read my
comments before posting. Hopefully, you could infer my meaning from the word
vomit.

------
rwallace
To answer the question asked: I've been on the LLVM mailing list for a few
months now, and been highly impressed both by the technical quality of the
project and by the competence and supportiveness of the people involved.

To address a meta-question: I disagree with the people who claim that you
shouldn't contribute to a project for any reason other than intrinsic interest
in the product itself. Most people, after all, work for extrinsic reasons;
it's a normal part of life. There is nothing wrong with contributing to an
open source project to improve your programming skills, boost your resume or
pay some of your karmic debt to your species for the gift of your life. These
are all valid reasons, and all are flexible regarding the specific nature of
the project.

~~~
lispit
I guess the flip side of "don't contribute to a project unless you are
intrinsically interested in it" is "don't contribute to a project you aren't
interested in unless you are capable of significantly helping it."

Someone inexperienced but strongly interested in a project can be taught to be
useful. And a knowledgeable resume-padder can very well spearhead useful
changes. But if you are both uninterested in the project and incapable of
helping it, you're more likely to hurt the project than help it. And, sorry to
say, but if you don't know where to help, then you're most likely on the "not
imminently useful" side and should be looking for things you're legitimately
passionate about instead of wasting peoples' time.

EDIT: Does anyone remember an article or comment from a few weeks ago about
how many open source projects tend to lose their focus and become more about
justifying the existence of a social group than achieving a goal? It seems
kinda relevant to me.

~~~
eljimmy
Another interesting aspect is someone may not realize they're interested in a
project until they've spent sometime in the code.

~~~
dvanduzer
That's a great point. I wonder if anybody has curated a list of projects that
are good for _learning_ how to work on software. As opposed to perhaps a
broader list of projects that are simply good communities.

------
carloselhalabi
Have you heard of Mozilla? [http://mozilla.org](http://mozilla.org)

I'm a Mozillian myself and I can tell you I wouldn't have been one if the
community wouldn't have showed me such a great and kind support since the
first minute I decided to step in a introduce myself. Plus we breathe OSS and
have multiple talents of every kind.

Mozilla works serving, promoting and protecting the Open Web, and provides the
tools to do so by ourselves. Firefox is -mostly- a community effort, with
translators, designers, and coders from all around the world.

If you decide to join, feel free to say Hi in the forums of the community:
[https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/](https://discourse.mozilla-
community.org/)

~~~
marcoperaza
Just be careful if you don't share their political views. They just might go
digging through everything you've ever said and every cause you've ever
donated to and start a witch hunt. Even if you invented Javascript.

~~~
sandofsky
A litmus test of a great community is how they deal with people who are
technically useful but socially reprehensible.

~~~
marcoperaza
That's an awfully strong judgment to make on the sole basis of a $1000
donation to a popular cause (one that won the election, no less). It's not
like he was a leader of the anti- gay-marriage movement. If he didn't bring
his politics to work, there was no good reason for anyone else to. There's no
evidence that his views on gay marriage affected how he treated anyone at
Mozilla. Not a single complaint as far as I've heard, and I'm sure that he
interacted with a lot of people given that he was a co-founder of Mozilla.

Magnanimity in victory is a virtue for a democratic society. Do you really
think that it's good to have political witch hunts every time the winds change
on a social issue?

~~~
humanrebar
> Magnanimity in victory is a virtue for a democratic society.

The word for this used to be "tolerance".

~~~
reinhardt
Which has limits:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

~~~
humanrebar
Was Eich intolerant? Or were his views just unpopular? I haven't seen any
evidence of intolerance from his side of things.

------
Zyst
Getting involved with open source should likely not be done of how a community
is, but rather because you love the product itself, and want to make it
better. If the community is nice, that's a huge plus, but in my opinion it
should not really be a deciding factor unless the community is outright
hostile.

Just try to ask in general, see applications you use frequently: Desktop, web,
and browser based. Programming languages, and websites you find yourself in
frequently. See if any of those are open source, and then send the author(s)
an email, ask if they accept contributions.

Do make sure to ask, I've had cases where I asked an author if they accepted
PRs in general, and the response was "I'm sorry no, I would much rather
maintain full control over the codebase", which is perfectly fine, in general,
find something you are passionate about, and then try to help.

I would really advise against starting open source contributions just for the
sake of contributing to open source.

When you go into a project the existing contributors will likely have to spend
time, and effort grooming you into someone who can properly navigate the code
base, in my experience people who join a project just for the sake of joining
something, or because they want to have "Contribute to Open software in my
free time" in their resume tend to drop out pretty frequently, and it's just
painful for all parties involved.

------
geerlingguy
Drupal's community is what got me into OSS, even though the language (PHP)
community seems to be at a strange crossroads currently.

I've also been somewhat involved in Ansible's community, and it's been nothing
but a positive experience so far.

It's interesting to compare some of the different communities; some seem to
value technical competence over diversity, some UX over architecture, etc.
It's probably easiest to dip your toes in the water and just make sure you can
get help early on—jump into IRC or forums and see how people react to some
initial questions you have about the project.

~~~
SwellJoe
As a counter-point: I've found it impossible to penetrate the Drupal
community. I have filed several tickets over the years, including patches,
which have often gone entirely without comment for sometimes months. Including
a bug report and patch against a core include file. IRC is _sometimes_
helpful, but usually not. In my experience, it's just _really_ hard to get any
questions answered or bugs fixed in Drupal.

~~~
hunvreus
I initially liked my experience with the Drupal community.

One of the things that drove me away (5+ years ago), beyond the direction the
project took around Drupal 6 [1], was being stuck on Drupal.org for
development.

In 2009, GitHub already offered everything the community would need, but
instead developers were stuck with (poorly) custom made solutions. Last time I
checked, it was still the case.

[1]: [http://teddy.fr/2013/01/25/dropping-the-
drop/](http://teddy.fr/2013/01/25/dropping-the-drop/)

~~~
SwellJoe
I have always had a mixed experience, and I think I mostly agree with that
blog post, for the most part. I know our most recent migration to Drupal 7
(still ongoing, about a year after I started working on it in my spare time;
it's the most painful migration I've ever worked on, including migrations
across CMS and languages...this particular site has been migrated from
OpenACS->Joomla->Drupal 6, all of those jumps were faster and easier than the
jump to Drupal 7).

I'm very uncomfortable with the direction of Drupal (the willingness to break
backward compatibility without credible paths forward for users being the most
painful for me). I've always assumed mostly it's due to my own ignorance, but
this blog post confirms some of that discomfort is not just me not knowing
what's going on. There's been a big move of putting things into the database
that once resided in code, and this makes it really challenging to figure out
how anything works. The abstraction runs really, really, deep, almost absurdly
so. Trying to figure out what makes a page happen is an exercise in
frustration a lot of the time, as it has pieces that are in code, pieces that
are in Views, and pieces that come from other mysterious locations (there's
stuff that I just assume will always remain beyond my kin).

Drupal 8 seems to be further down that path. Certainly there are improvements,
but it just requires so much knowledge to even begin to work on anything in
Drupal that it's incredibly frustrating for someone that dips in every week or
so, to add new functionality or fix a bug on my company website.

Earlier in this migration, and at several stages along the way, I've assessed
whether I could move our site to something else with less effort and end up
with something nicer (both for users and to maintain). I opted not to at
several points along the path, but I'm still not convinced that was a wise
choice, even as close as I am now to launching a D7 version. Frankly, I dread
working on the damned thing. It's just not fun.

As for github, I don't actually blame an OSS project for not wanting to move
into a proprietary source hosting platform. I have uneasy feelings about my
own projects being hosted there, and plan to work on a gitlab or Phabricator
or something else deployment eventually, so we are not beholden to a
proprietary third party (github is a great product and they seem like great
people, but so was SourceForge at one time).

Anyway, if there were some other thing (I don't like using the term CMS,
because people often assume I'm wanting a CMS...when "content management" is
effectively 0% of my use case for Drupal) that had integrated forums, ticket
tracker, shopping cart with subscriptions and licensing, and a way to manage
docs, and it didn't require mountains of custom code, I would have already
moved away from Drupal. I've considered building something custom with a
framework, but this isn't my core competency or interest; I just want to put
some pieces together and sell and support the software I do want to work on
full-time.

~~~
AdrianRossouw
after almost a decade building everything with Drupal, i realized that only
one site (a community blogging site) really benefitted from it.

From what I've seen of D8 it is going to be so different that it will almost
certainly be cheaper to rewrite it in a simpler way (something like laravel
for instance) than attempt the migration. For all but the most trivial sites,
that is.

*edit: Oh, and are you aware of backdropcms? it is a fork of drupal 6 that is maintained.

[https://backdropcms.org/](https://backdropcms.org/)

~~~
ausjke
Spent too many hours with drupal over the years and I will stick with it, D8
has similar interfaces with D7 though the framework is totally revamped.

I also failed to find a good alternative, tried many but always came back to
Drupal

------
hoorayimhelping
React. I'm constantly impressed by Ben Alpert's[1] patience and response time
and ability to answer questions all over the internet.

1\.
[http://stackoverflow.com/tags/reactjs/topusers](http://stackoverflow.com/tags/reactjs/topusers)

~~~
spicyj
I appreciate you saying that. Thank you.

~~~
medecau
How do you do this?

~~~
spicyj
I try to be helpful whenever I have a chance. When I first adopted React, my
coworkers were frustrated that whenever they Googled for errors they didn't
find anything, so I committed myself to writing answers to all the reactjs
questions on Stack Overflow for a few months. I do my best to be helpful when
responding to issues too -- though I've had less time to spend on maintaining
our GitHub repo lately and consequently been less helpful.

------
jlarocco
The reasoning behind that question doesn't make any sense. The idea of
contributing to a project that you're not personally interested in, solely
based on an external reason seems wrong to me. That's true for-pay software
development, but is even more true when it comes to open source development.

I think you'd be a lot better off looking at projects you are currently using,
or in areas that are interesting to you, and hanging out in their IRC
channels, reading their mailing lists for a while, checking their bug tracker,
and tinkering with their code.

At the very least, you should clarify how you want to help out, what you're
interested in doing, and what your skill set is.

The way it's phrased right now, you'd get more meaningful answers just
randomly clicking projects on GitHub.

------
gmac
PostgreSQL (I've always been hugely impressed by the team, though not myself a
contributor).

~~~
aftabh
+1 for Postgres. It's one of the most awesome OSS project: great development
team, community, large codebase (which is well organized and very modular),
has a very good code and end-user documentation, always working with a
significant number of important computer science problems and concepts
(ranging from easy to very complex ones).

[Disclosure: I'm not a Postgres contributor myself. In the past, I had been
working on Postgres core and related projects at EnterpriseDB (a Postgres
company) for 5+ years].

------
scrollaway
I'm the lead for LXQt, the Qt-based desktop environment:
[http://lxqt.org/](http://lxqt.org/)

I'm very happy to say that everyone on our team is kind and supportive. I'm
also happy to say this is not a unique trait of our team, it's something
you'll see in a lot of open source projects.

Feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile) if you're interested in LXQt.

~~~
tym0
Hey nice, a new release, I was getting worried that the project was going
down.

~~~
scrollaway
Nope, we're still active, but we're suffering from manpower shortage ;)

------
philip1209
The JuliaOpt / JuMP (Julia for Mathematical Programming) team has been
responsive and supportive. When I file a Github issue at a random hour, they
respond in minutes. The quality of code and testing is outstanding, and
frankly for a project started in academia that's rare. In the dynamic world of
pre-1.0 Julia, they've set the standard for 3rd party libraries, accommodated
deprecations from the language immediately as versions change, and overall
driven the advancement of scientific computing.

[https://github.com/juliaopt/jump.jl](https://github.com/juliaopt/jump.jl)

Edit: Here's a great example of the JuMP team debugging somebody's particular
script, running it, and benchmarking it - all because somebody filed a Github
issue.
[https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl/issues/614](https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl/issues/614)

------
shmerl
Rust has a great community: [https://www.rust-lang.org](https://www.rust-
lang.org)

~~~
JBReefer
I thought Rust's community is infamously ultra-polticized and prone to witch
hunts?

~~~
shmerl
Any example of this?

~~~
humanrebar
Perhaps that was a broader comment about Mozilla?

~~~
shmerl
Not sure. I didn't notice any witch hunts there.

------
jensnockert
Rust is generally awesome.

~~~
peteretep
Rust's IRC channel is amazing - supportive, thoughtful, and non-condescending.
This is in sharp contrast to the Go one, which is an absolute cesspit.

~~~
elithrar
Thankfully (but still unfortunately), the Go community Slack does a great job
of replacing the IRC channel with more civilized/productive discussion.

The IRC channel, like many, is often not a friendly place.

~~~
sanxiyn
If this is the case, I think Go people should remove IRC and add Slack from
this page: [https://golang.org/help/](https://golang.org/help/)

~~~
faddat
No! No more slack!

* Rocketchat * Gitter * Let's Chat [https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat](https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat) * Baloons [https://github.com/rickyrauch/Balloons.IO](https://github.com/rickyrauch/Balloons.IO) * Friends [https://github.com/moose-team/friends](https://github.com/moose-team/friends) * Chats [https://github.com/acani/Chats](https://github.com/acani/Chats) * HackChat [https://github.com/AndrewBelt/hack.chat](https://github.com/AndrewBelt/hack.chat) * Jabbr [https://github.com/JabbR/JabbR](https://github.com/JabbR/JabbR) * qTox [https://github.com/tux3/qTox](https://github.com/tux3/qTox) * TorChat [https://github.com/prof7bit/TorChat](https://github.com/prof7bit/TorChat)

I bet that they can be just as friendly using an open source application on
golang-based kubernetes clusters.

------
nemesisrobot
I've made small code contributions to Firefox and Servo, both Mozilla
projects, and I have nothing but good things to say about everyone involved
with the two projects. As a newcomer to both, the respective teams were very
welcoming, helpful, and most of all, patient especially during the review
process.

------
dhanush
The ZeroMQ community is incredibly supportive towards newcomers and existing
members alike. And ofcourse the people of the community are really smart,
because you dont build a scalable and lightweight (and popular) messaging
framework unless you are smart.

I have pitched in with a few (simple) commits once in a while and am looking
to contribute more regularly.

Here's all the code: [http://github.com/zeromq/](http://github.com/zeromq/)

And a very comprehensive guide:
[http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all](http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all)

And, the contribution process followed is known as C4:
[http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:22](http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:22)

You can get in touch via IRC, which is #zeromq on irc.freenode.net ; Try to
linger around after asking your questions, and someone would eventually
respond.

You may also send in your queries to the ZeroMQ mailing list.
([http://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-
dev](http://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev))

Some of us also hang out in the #zeromq channel in the Slack group for Golang:
[http://gophers.slack.com/](http://gophers.slack.com/)

------
otakucode
I've contributed to a few Python projects, and the experience I had with the
IPython and beets groups both stand out in my mind as very friendly. The patch
I contributed to IPython was vanishingly trivial. It removed an unnecessary
function call in a code path that wasn't even performance-sensitive (I just
stumbled on it when looking into a more complex issue). I would have
understood if the patch just lingered without being looked at for ages. It
didn't address an existing issue, didn't impact the correctness of the code,
and barely had any consequence to performance. But, it was quickly reviewed
and accepted and the maintainers were thankful to have my contribution. I was
very pleasantly surprised, and will certainly consider contributing to their
project again when I have time. Likewise, I ran into a bug in the beets MP3
tagging/collection manager and was able to report the issue, discuss it with
the author and other contributors to determine the preferred way to handle the
situation, create a new unit test and fix, and get it accepted all within a
couple of days. Everyone I spoke with was very inviting and helpful. I hope to
be able to help them again in the future as well!

------
virtualsue
The Perl 6 development team is generally good-natured and work to be pleasant
to each other and newcomers. [http://perl6.org/](http://perl6.org/)

~~~
SwellJoe
The Perl community, in general, has always been extremely friendly and
welcoming. That seems to carry over to Perl 6. I can't think of any time I was
unable to get guidance quickly via a variety of channels; Perl Monks, IRC,
etc. are good places to go. Filing issues about CPAN modules can be a somewhat
less satisfying thing (depends very much on the author), but usually also
results in something good happening.

------
espeed
Apache Tinkerpop:
[https://tinkerpop.incubator.apache.org](https://tinkerpop.incubator.apache.org)

The TinkerPop project is thoroughly documented, questions in the user groups
are answered fast, and the R&D keeps pushing the space forward. For example,
check out this new paper by Marko Rodriguez (TinkerPop founder and creator of
the Gremlin graph programming language):

"Quantum Walks with Gremlin"
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06278v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06278v1.pdf)

Here's a quote from a community member:

    
    
      Something like 13 yrs ago, I was trying to do server-side Java.  It
      was a nightmare, until I discovered a thing called Apache JServ.
    
      It was simple, elegant and the developer group was wonderfully
      supportive and well organized.
    
      Just as with JServ, way back then, Tinkerpop has all the same
      characteristics, and gives me the same feeling of having hit on
      something really valuable that will take me a long way.
    
      Well ...  JServ morphed into TomCat, and I've used it consistently
      ever since.  I'm confident Tinkerpop is going the same way, so I'm
      only too pleased to help where I can.
    
      Sincerest regards,
      Hasan
    

Source: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gremlin-
users/pF577035UpY/M7...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gremlin-
users/pF577035UpY/M7t9uIiIOtIJ)

Disclaimer: I am a TinkerPop contributor.

------
beagle3
Off the top of my head:

    
    
        Ansible
        FLTK
        SCons (when I used it. I wouldn't recommend the project, but I do recommend the community)
        Nim
        Python
        ffmpeg (mostly supportive, but expect you to be mannered too)

------
segmondy
The open source project that needs you are the very ones that are unkind, not
supportive with less talented teams. Someone needs to join them and lead, to
show kindness, to teach how to be supportive of newbies, and to bring talent.

~~~
sanderjd
That sounds nice, but in practice it is likely to be an exercise in futility
and frustration.

~~~
Manishearth
Agree to some extent, but it depends on the team though.

From what I've seen there are many projects that aren't _kind_ , but they
aren't too unkind either. Or if they are unkind, it's not by conscious choice
-- just what happens when you get people coming from other unkind projects.
Not people who _want_ the project to be unkind, mind you, just people who are
used to that and okay with it.

Such projects can benefit a lot from a few empathetic community members.

~~~
sanderjd
From what I've seen of you in the Rust community, you might be one of the
people who has the chops to actually make a large positive impact on a
project's community. But for me, at least right now, without practicing a
bunch, I think it would be futile and frustrating, and I suspect most people
are in that boat.

~~~
Manishearth
:)

Yeah, I'm not suggesting that anyone throw themselves into a toxic environment
with the goal of fixing things. I'm not one of those people either (but I have
tremendous respect for those who are). Just saying that it's not a dichotomy
-- there's a lot of space in between kind and unkind for communities which are
tolerable and can be improved. YMMV though :)

------
erichmond
Can't recommend [http://www.onyxplatform.org/](http://www.onyxplatform.org/)
highly enough. Tight core of extremely talented and passionate engineers who
are working on an exciting project in a more exciting space.

~~~
nXqd
Onyx really simplifies the idea of data processing. I would recommend anyone
using it, since we can integrate with another storage, and processing engine
easily :)

------
mightybyte
I've always found the Haskell community very helpful and willing to go to
great lengths to explain complicated concepts to newcomers.

~~~
otakucode
I would definitely second this. I have never contributed to a Haskell project,
so didn't mention it in my main reply, but I was nothing short of astonished
and humbled by my experience with the Haskell community when I was learning
it. I've never encountered any other community that was so welcoming and
willing to bend over backwards for newbies. I honestly felt a little bit bad.
I grew up online, and I consider myself skilled at integrating with
established communities, being polite and reserved and not expecting to be
accorded unearned respect and the like. But after just asking a couple
questions in the Haskell IRC channel, I found people willing to have extended
in-depth discussions with me even though I was a total unknown. I didn't feel
deserving of such an investment of their time and I have never come across it
before or since. I consider the Python community to be excellent in my
experience, but Haskell is truly god-level tier. They changed what I even
thought was possible for a programming language community.

------
kfogel
Visit [https://openhatch.org/](https://openhatch.org/) \-- they exist to match
people with good open source projects. Good luck!

~~~
detaro
FWIW, I've tried to find interesting things through this page a few times and
have utterly failed. Maybe I'm missing something, but the search feature is a
bad aggregator of issue trackers, without useful filtering or pre-selection.

------
aedocw
I would encourage you to check out OpenStack[1]. As a community we are trying
really hard to be welcoming and helpful to new contributors.

[1][http://docs.openstack.org/contributor-
guide/index.html](http://docs.openstack.org/contributor-guide/index.html)

------
trishume
[https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs](https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs)

Great community, has a very friendly Gitter chat room where people
collaborate, very nice maintainer as well.

~~~
pzone
syl20bnr bristles too easily at any criticism of the project though. I think
he would do better ignoring reddit &c entirely instead of acting as PR
manager.

------
ianjorgensen
Nightscout. Software for people with and affected by Type 1 diabetes by people
with and affected by Type 1 diabetes.
[https://github.com/nightscout](https://github.com/nightscout)

------
jimhefferon
TeX Live [https://www.tug.org/texlive/](https://www.tug.org/texlive/) people
are awesome, the output is very widely used, and here for the long haul.

------
harlowja
I'm biased, but I'll say some stuff I work on and stuff that is general
integrated into the openstack (and greater python) ecosystem(s) (each project
in openstack IMHO has its own culture, so you may need to explore to find a
match for you).

[http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/](http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/)

[http://docs.openstack.org/developer/tooz/](http://docs.openstack.org/developer/tooz/)

Any of the other libraries on:

[https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo)

We (myself and the rest of the oslo team) try to be friendly folks so feel
free to drop by on freenode at the #openstack-oslo channel.

Other openstack projects:

[http://governance.openstack.org/reference/projects/index.htm...](http://governance.openstack.org/reference/projects/index.html)

------
1971genocide
The open source world is flouring in 2015.

There is no shortage of amazing teams working on amazing projects on the web.

Its hard to single out just one of them - so its best if we could know more
about your background.

If you are unable to find anything that is good enough then just start your
own !

Do not be be demotivated - as long as you find it useful - someone else
somewhere will also find it useful.

Even simple logging libraries have their audience.

So good luck !

------
viraptor
From my (limited) experience, I've been impressed wherever I interacted with
developers of: python-requests, salt, rust.

------
johnnycarcin
The people working on the redox project have been awesome the times I have
interacted with them and can always use additional hands. Everyone there seems
to buy into the common goal idea. [https://github.com/redox-
os](https://github.com/redox-os)

------
maxdemarzi
Neo4j welcomes direct and indirect(drivers, frameworks, examples) contributors
with open arms. Lots of our employees were community members first.

------
Lappleism
I'm the tech evangelist at Zalando and co-organize our Open Source Guild. Our
engineers fit your criteria and would be open to your contributions:

[https://github.com/zalando](https://github.com/zalando)

[https://github.com/zalando-stups](https://github.com/zalando-stups)

We have projects in Go, Clojure, Python, Scala, Java ...

I'm a beginner-level coder and my colleagues have been extremely supportive,
staying late to teach me JavaScript and reviewing my Python. Let us know if
you end up contributing: @zalandotech. :)

------
mbilker
[https://github.com/nylas/N1](https://github.com/nylas/N1)

I really do enjoy the Nylas team and are well receiving of any issues I find
or any support I need developing a plugin.

~~~
arsalanb
Yes, I second this.

------
pegasos1
Rust language! One of the most supportive groups I've ever been involved with.

------
orionblastar
Right now ReactOS is doing better because they used Indiegogo funding to hire
better developers: [http://community.reactos.org/index.php/news/years-
progress-t...](http://community.reactos.org/index.php/news/years-progress-the-
shell)

I tried to post a link to ReactOS via submit to find out I got the "Whoa
you're submitting too fast" message, so I lost submit privileges somehow. I
apologize if I submitted anything wrong.

Creating a free and open source alternative to Windows that uses Windows apps
and Drivers, one that isn't based on Linux is really hard and need really
talented people to keep compatibility with Windows.

I think when their 0.4 release is available, it will do better than the 0.3
releases. With Windows 10 giving people privacy concerns there needs to be an
alternative that runs Windows apps to compete with Windows that uses Windows
drivers.

They just got Steam to work with it and if they get some of the Dotnet
libraries and DirectX to run some of the video games, they can put a dent into
Microsoft Windows usage.

[https://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=114980#p114980](https://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=114980#p114980)

Yeah I know can run WINE with Linux, but ReactOS is targeted at people who
can't figure out Linux but want a Windows type OS.

------
ariestiyansyah
Why not start contribute to Mozilla?

[https://mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/](https://mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/)

~~~
kenrick95
I think fixing easy bugs are the easiest way to get around and interact.

[https://bugzil.la/sw:%22%5Bgood%20first%20bug%5D%22&limit=0](https://bugzil.la/sw:%22%5Bgood%20first%20bug%5D%22&limit=0)

------
chei0aiV
I've always enjoyed contributing to the Debian community.

~~~
ausjke
correct, debian really should be on the top here.

------
dragly
Qt and Qt3D. I haven't contributed as much to Qt as I've wanted to, but the
little I did was met with support and great mentoring. They are a very
talented group.

If you're interested in physics, mathematics or other sciences, I'd recommend
SciPy. I attended one of their conferences and met many really nice, kind and
talented people. (Open Source conferences and meet-ups are a great way to get
to know people and kick-starting contributions.)

------
dbrecht
I've found that OS communities have largely come a LONG ways over the last few
years. Most are helpful and are full of smart, nice people. That said, there
are always going to be a few less than cordial people in every crowd.

When picking an OS project to get involved in, there are only two suggestions
I have:

1\. Make sure there's a fair sized community behind it with > 1 committer (not
much worse than getting involved with a project that just dies) 2\. Make sure
it's something that's going to hold your attention for a good while and it's
something you're passionate about. Generally, contributing to OS projects
isn't really a fly by night thing (of course depending on the level of
involvement you're looking for). If you get involved with a project that has a
great community but isn't something you're actually passionate about, chances
of long term involvement aren't really high.

From personal experience, the Python community has been the most enjoyable for
me to date. Filled with academics and hackers, scientists and CRUD so
developers, I have yet to see another community filled with such diversity
from which comes intelligent, positive discussion and results.

------
zwischenzug
You could try mine :)

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/README.md)

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/README.md#con...](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/README.md#contributing)

------
caseysoftware
It's hard to just "pick a project" and start contributing. You need a little
bit of passion, excitement, or just plain need. Look at the tools that you
already use and depend on and start there.

Odds are you know how to set them up, configure a few things, and the like. In
most cases, a few pull requests to the docs are not just welcome but greatly
appreciated.

(I've been managing projects since 2007 and participating since 2001.)

------
faddat
Awesome open source crews:

* Rancher - [https://github.com/rancher](https://github.com/rancher) * Weave - [https://github.com/weave.works](https://github.com/weave.works) * OpenStack (IRC) - irc.freenode.net #openstack * Kubernetes - [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes) * Docker - [https://github.com/docker](https://github.com/docker) * EmileVague - [https://github.com/EmileVauge/traefik](https://github.com/EmileVauge/traefik) * Enspiral - enspiral.com * MetaMaps - metamaps.cc

....That's an incomplete list of projects whose teams have put up with me, and
even gone so far as to ask for more. I've worked in OSS for a little over a
year now, and I can heartily say that I haven't regretted the decision once.

------
burkemw3
I've been impressed with working on [syncthing][]. The team is very open to
discuss anything that comes up, which makes it easier for me to tackle things.

I've also been impressed with the user experience of the product. Installation
and configuration was much easier than I expected, and then it just runs!

[syncthing]: [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

------
richardboegli
Epic's Unreal Engine 4 team and the community around it is an amazing kind,
supportive, friendly and talented group of people.

[http://unrealengine.com/](http://unrealengine.com/)

Its one of the reasons I got back into game dev and chose to use this engine.

The engine itself is state-of-the-art and the improvements per each release is
AWESOME.

As the engine is a commercial offering that is open source, there are a lot of
people involved. This makes it easier for new people to get onboard. They
twitch on a biweekly basis
[http://twitch.tv/unrealengine/](http://twitch.tv/unrealengine/)

Have a look at the last two release notes for an example of what they get up
too.

[https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-
engine-49-released](https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-
engine-49-released)

[https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-
engine-4-10-release...](https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-
engine-4-10-released)

If I recall correctly, 4.11 is more a stability release then feature release.
It is the release currently being developed. Check out the Trello board to see
what features are being developed where

[https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap](https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap)

I'd advise to sign up for an account, link your github account, have a look
through and join the forums.

I've got the same account name on there if you have any questions.

~~~
chei0aiV
Is Unreal Engine really open source? Doesn't look like it to me.

[https://www.unrealengine.com/eula](https://www.unrealengine.com/eula)

~~~
richardboegli
Yes it is open source, but not libre / free. i.e: not GPL / BSD / MIT style
etc...

If you want to view and modify the code you can.

So it is open in that sense.

~~~
simoncion
I think the pithy phrase you were looking for was "It's open source, but not
Free Software.". :)

~~~
chei0aiV
No, it is more like "The source code is available if you register but it is
not Open Source and not Free Software".

~~~
simoncion
Is the source code package you receive complete?

If it is, then you _must_ remember that sending a snail-mail request to get a
snail-mailed set of disks in return, _and_ being required to send the money
required to cover the cost of making a copy of the disks _along_ with your
request is a 100% permitted way to fulfil the source code distribution
requirement of the GPLv2.

~~~
chei0aiV
I haven't received the source code package and don't intend to do that.

The license on the Unreal Engine source code is not GPLv2, it is a EULA that
does not meet the Open Source Definition.

[https://www.unrealengine.com/eula](https://www.unrealengine.com/eula)
[https://opensource.org/osd](https://opensource.org/osd)

~~~
simoncion
> The license on the Unreal Engine source code is not GPLv2...

I'm aware of that. I was making you aware that one of the canonical Free
Software and Open Source licenses permits the source code provider to require
requesters to use a rather inconvenient request method _and_ cover the
provider's actual duplication costs. This means that putting source code
behind a free-of-charge authorization wall would still be 100% in compliance
with the GPLv2's source code distribution requirement.

> ...it is a EULA that does not meet the Open Source Definition.

That doesn't make Unreal Engine closed source. Unreal Engine is open source.
It just does not fit under the umbrella of _ESR 's_ Open Source philosophy.

Much ink was spilled decades ago about how shitty it was of ESR to name his
philosophy in such a confusing way. I expect that we'll never be rid of the
confusion.

It even got _you_ confused! Notice how -in my reply to richardboegli- [0] I
write "Free Software" with leading capitals (indicating that I mean libre
software, rather than gratis software), but I do _not_ write "open source"
with leading capitals (indicating that I mean that the source code is
available, but that it does _not_ necessarily adhere to ESR's Open Source
philosophy).

Make sense?

If my argument was not convincing, please do me the favor of answering the
following question: "What is the English phrase that describes the opposite of
'closed source software', (that is, software whose source code is available
for perusal, rather than software whose code is not)?".

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10643807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10643807)

~~~
chei0aiV
Thanks for the explanations, that explains your GPLv2 post well.

As far as I know there is no phrase that describes software whose source code
has been intentionally publicly released under a license that doesn't meet the
OSD/etc. I definitely wouldn't take the lower-case "open source" as meaning
that. Perhaps "proprietary public source code"?

~~~
simoncion
> As far as I know there is no phrase that describes software whose source
> code has been intentionally publicly released under a license that doesn't
> meet the OSD/etc.

Were you -perhaps- born in the 1990's or later? As I remember it, "open
source" was commonly used to describe programs that were not "closed source".
Additionally, I expect that if we were to ask a few thousand native English
speakers either "What is the opposite of closed?" or "What is closed's
antonym?", the overwhelming majority of them would reply "open".

I get that you don't want to concede the point, and that you _might_ feel that
acknowledging the validity and reasonableness of my position would serve to
weaken your own position. However -in truth- this _strengthens_ your
assertions, as it indicates that you've put thought and consideration into
your positions, and -crucially- are willing to revise your view of the world
when it becomes clear that your view doesn't match reality.

Twitter "loves" zealots. [0] Most reasonable people don't.

[0] Note that a zealot is different from a hard-liner. RMS is a hard-liner who
has put a lot of thought and consideration into his positions. A member of
$SOCIAL_MOVEMENT who primarily interacts with the movement by frothing about
it on $SOCIAL_MEDIA is a zealot.

------
jondubois
I think the SocketCluster community meets this description (I'm the main
author). Especially on the kind/supportive side. It's relatively small (about
60 people in our chat group), we are not supported by VC funding of any kind
so everyone is just doing it for fun (and to please the community). Based on
the experience I've had using Gitter (chat) to get assistance on other
projects, I'd say our helping/chat culture is among the best.

Also if you have a truly good idea, it will be heard and implemented.

Website: [http://socketcluster.io/](http://socketcluster.io/)

Gitter (chat):
[https://gitter.im/SocketCluster/socketcluster](https://gitter.im/SocketCluster/socketcluster)

I think this 'niceness' comes from being a small, dedicated, growing community
based around learning and having fun. If the community is already large and
successful, you will just be a small cog in a big machine.

------
shurcooL
I'm not seeing this mentioned at the top level, so I'll say it. I'm impressed
with the team and community of Go:

[https://golang.org/](https://golang.org/)

A few great points:

[https://blog.golang.org/open-source](https://blog.golang.org/open-source)

[https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/13073-...](https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/13073-code-
of-conduct.md)

It's the first language/open source project for me that I consider having
"the" community, or at least one I care about being a large part of. I was
mostly doing C++ before Go, and that didn't feel like something that had a
single unified community around - there might've been many different ones.

But yeah, I've really been enjoying Go, its community and the project's future
prospects.

------
jrimclean
If you're into games at all, I would highly recommend the Godot Game Engine
([http://www.godotengine.org](http://www.godotengine.org)). They are very
active on IRC and in the forums. If you have a question, you'll almost
certainly get an answer. They are also are very welcoming of contributions.

------
DasIch
Django

~~~
Scarblac
Django Under The Hood was primarily a conference about love and acceptance of
all fellow beings, I think :-)

------
antoviaque
Open edX, the stack powering edX.org, is a very interesting (and useful!)
project to contribute to. The community and the reviewers are very friendly.
There are byte-sized tasks available to get started, and you will get guidance
on the tickets and PRs. It's a large Django code base, and changes you make
impact millions of students within a week - as real and concrete as it gets. :
)

[https://github.com/edx/edx-
platform/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING...](https://github.com/edx/edx-
platform/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst)

[http://bit.ly/edxbugs](http://bit.ly/edxbugs)

[http://open.edx.org/](http://open.edx.org/)

[http://github.com/edx/edx-platform/](http://github.com/edx/edx-platform/)

------
mohit
Apache Mesos and it's ecosystem (Apache Aurora, Marathon, Apache Myriad,
Chronos etc.) has been the most kind, supportive and talented ecosystem of
open-source projects.

It's a community of individuals who are very talented, patient, helpful and
inviting.

Disclaimer: I work at Mesosphere, and one of the co-founders of Apache Myriad.

------
stratigos
[https://github.com/rubycorns/rorganize.it](https://github.com/rubycorns/rorganize.it)

Rubycorns of Rails Girls workshops

Also:
[https://github.com/spacetraveler/rubyissues](https://github.com/spacetraveler/rubyissues)

Rubyissues

------
plinkplonk
Julia.

Talent off the charts. _Very_ nice people, and very supportive.

------
riadhtn
Mozilla: Firefox accounts content server is for example very awesome with an
amazing team and a lot of bus for beginners

[https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-content-
server](https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-content-server)

------
kencausey
I found the community around Squeak
([http://www.squeak.org/](http://www.squeak.org/)) to be extremely pleasant
and supportive some years ago. I suspect the offshoot community around Pharo
is similar.

------
mattezell
Relative 'new comers' to the block, the Ionic Framework has an amazing hands
on team behind it and the community as a whole is fantastic.
[http://ionicframework.com](http://ionicframework.com)

------
viktorbenei
If you're interested in iOS & Android dev / automation tools you should check
out [https://fastlane-tools](https://fastlane-tools) and
[https://www.bitrise.io/cli](https://www.bitrise.io/cli) . The two projects
have a fair amount of overlap, but handle a couple of key concept differently
(e.g. built in modules in fastlane vs decentralized step library in bitrise).
I'm more than happy to help you get started if you would decide to contribute
to bitrise

------
usenetthrowa
FreeBSD has a kind, international team of developers. It may be a scary
project to contribute to for beginners to open source because it is an
operating system, and people have some apprehension about improving operating
systems.

------
dedosk
www.KDE.org in general, Krita team is considered very friendly and supportive.

~~~
pzone
I've loved contributing to Krita. It's also heartwarming seeing the lead
contributors doing things like sending out stacks of postcards to donors, and
great that IRC is for both devs and users.

------
veritas3241
I'm pretty partial to RethinkDB. They were my first contribution to OSS.

------
mplewis
PlatformIO:
[https://github.com/platformio/platformio](https://github.com/platformio/platformio)

The author has gotten involved personally to help me with issues I was seeing.
He provided advice on architecture and use case, and he does an extremely good
job of keeping the product current.

[https://github.com/platformio/platformio/issues/330](https://github.com/platformio/platformio/issues/330)

------
jedanbik
Scikit-learn is pretty great.

Very appreciative, smart, and plenty of room for beginners.

~~~
mathgenius
Seconded. I found the scikit learn guys very helpful.

Although, they seem to get alot of requests "hey i'm new here, what can i do?"
So try to start with a more concrete question than that.

------
joeysim
I recommend looking into re:dash, which is an amazing and widely used data
collaboration tool for your data. Arik Fraimovich is doing a great work with a
growing community of contributors.

[https://github.com/getredash/redash](https://github.com/getredash/redash)
[http://redash.io/](http://redash.io/)

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of EverythingMe, re:dash was born in one of our
hackathons but have since become its own beast.

~~~
chaos_monkey
Can I ask what are some of the differences between redash and a tool like
Apache Zeppelin?

------
suls
Hi Mike,

I have found the twitter/finagle guys to be very welcoming:

[https://github.com/twitter/finagle](https://github.com/twitter/finagle)
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/finaglers](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/finaglers)
[https://gitter.im/twitter/finagle](https://gitter.im/twitter/finagle)

------
binarycrusader
From my experience, SDL, Ogre3D, and Dragonfly BSD were great. There are other
projects I've made contributions to, but many of them are a lot more
challenging to engage with.

------
aortega
Openbsd.org

~~~
epoch1970
I've had very good experiences with the OpenBSD and the FreeBSD communities,
too. As long as you do your homework and the answer you seek isn't in the
documentation or FAQs, they'll go to the ends of the earth to help you out.
This is really valuable for seriously hard problems.

------
hakanderyal
If you are interested in javascript, rackt[1] team is working on awesome
stuff.

[1]: [https://github.com/rackt](https://github.com/rackt)

------
jordigh
Octave and Mercurial. I'm involved in both. Come by, and if I see anybody
being even slightly unpleasant, I'll be sure to call them out and help you
feel welcome.

------
PuffinBlue
Hugo[1,2] is pretty nice. Very responsive team too.

I like the discuss forum[3] they have, it's not particularly high volume and
people are pretty good to each other.

[1] [http://gohugo.io/](http://gohugo.io/)

[2] [https://github.com/spf13/hugo](https://github.com/spf13/hugo)

[3] [https://discuss.gohugo.io/](https://discuss.gohugo.io/)

------
jnardiello
No doubts: Elixir :)

Hope it helps

------
nsfmc
i had a fantastic time contributing some code to the ghost.org blog platform.
they are incredibly well managed, fantastically transparent, and provide a
great deal of support for people contributing to the codebase. very much an
a+++++++ would contribute again situation.

Probably the thing that sets any receptive project is its ability to identify
areas where it needs help and setting aside well defined (and documented)
projects in those areas. In many projects, there's lots of work needed to be
done but the priorities aren't obvious and so lots of contributions get left
on the floor because they're just not in any way priorities for the active
maintainers. it takes lots of work and maturity for a project to advertise
this sort of stuff which is why these situations seem few and far between.

Regardless, try to invest time in filling in the _current_ needs of projects
rather than unsolicited work. some unsolicited work (bugfixes) is easily
accepted, but features are often hard to incorporate especially if they're not
aligned with the short term goals of the project.

------
dvirsky
@antirez is all of the above to an amazing extent, however redis is one of the
hardest projects to contribute code to from my own experience.

The community is awesome and very friendly and helpful though, and I reckon
most of my contribution to redis has been as a community member helping out
others or getting involved in discussions of redis' future, which is also a
great way to get involved.

------
mtgred
Jinteki.net: a platform to play Netrunner in the browser. We welcome
contributors and have a Slack where devs can ask questions. Send me an email
if you want an invite.

[https://github.com/mtgred/netrunner](https://github.com/mtgred/netrunner)

[http://www.jinteki.net/](http://www.jinteki.net/)

------
omershapira
openFrameworks is extremely supportive, built from the ground up using
volunteers, receives regular contributions by artists giving code back, and is
in constant need of quality control (so many platforms to support natively...)

[https://github.com/openframeworks/openFrameworks](https://github.com/openframeworks/openFrameworks)

------
jeena
It is a bit more than a open source project, but I really like the community
around the [https://indiewebcamp.com](https://indiewebcamp.com)

I wrote in more detail about it half a year ago:
[https://jeena.net/indiewebcamp-2015](https://jeena.net/indiewebcamp-2015)

------
i336_
I'd have to say NetSurf ([http://netsurf-browser.org](http://netsurf-
browser.org)).

I'd barely joined the IRC channel and was discussing UI enhancements when it
was mentioned I could have my own branch on their private Git repo server if I
wanted :D

That was hugely welcoming, in my book!

------
billwashere
ScummVM does! - [http://scummvm.org/](http://scummvm.org/)

------
cpach
[http://racket-lang.org/](http://racket-lang.org/)

------
simulo
The [http://hood.ie/](http://hood.ie/) community is nice. Also, I was rather
happy with etherpad’s community: [http://etherpad.org/](http://etherpad.org/)

------
daleharvey
I cant say this without bias, but being a welcoming project has been one of my
main focuses with
[http://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb](http://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb)

------
pma
Most open source project teams are decent except Mozilla,which is vindictive
at best.

------
jeffwidman
SQLAlchemy - Great docs, well programmed, very extensible/flexible/powerful.

------
rmason
Lucee has a very active community and there isn't the division and
disagreement I've seen in other projects.

[https://github.com/lucee/Lucee](https://github.com/lucee/Lucee)

------
lambdafunc
Surprised that no one mentioned Facebook's Presto project:
[https://github.com/facebook/presto](https://github.com/facebook/presto)

Presto team is just awesome.

------
brchsiao
If you're interested in Python and Lisp, Hy
([https://github.com/hylang/hy](https://github.com/hylang/hy)) is great.
They're welcoming and funny.

------
wineisamazing
Wine's an amazing open source project, a compatibility layer project for
running windows applications on POSIX-compliant OS's (OSX, Linux, BSD etc)
started 22 years ago and still going strong. The devs are super talented and
contributions are always welcome.

I've been contributing there and my so far my personal experience has been
positive, fun and challenging at the same time :D

There's literally a ton of different things that you can contribute on and
while there is some initial friction in getting patches accepted, they always
make sure to point you towards the right direction to get your patch accepted.
They also hold annual conferences (wineconf).

Check out their website for more info [http://winehq.org/](http://winehq.org/)

------
will_pseudonym
More important to me--Which companies have kind, supportive, talented teams?

~~~
sanderjd
This might be interesting as a similar "Ask HN" of its own.

~~~
will_pseudonym
I'm on it, once I figure out how to do an Ask HN!

------
lando2319
XVim (XCode Pluggin for VIM-style bindings)
[https://github.com/XVimProject/XVim](https://github.com/XVimProject/XVim)

------
jlukic
In the author of Semantic UI, if you're interested in working on the project
you can always email me personally and start a dialog jack@semantic-ui.com

------
mfholden
If you're interested in code review / project management platforms, the ex-
facebookers behind the long-running tool, Phabricator, are awesome.

------
smcguinness
[https://github.com/callemall/material-
ui](https://github.com/callemall/material-ui)

------
tymekpavel
GraphLab and Spark.

------
donatj
CakePHP. I'm not a big fan but when I was working on a project their chat room
was the most supportive helpful I've ever seen.

------
fernly
It's a smaller project, but I've made small contributions to PyInstaller and
found the lead people to be very agreeable.

------
marknadal
This is the ideal we are striving for at
[https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) , and I hope our
[https://gitter.im/amark/gun](https://gitter.im/amark/gun) is evidence of
that.

We're an Open Source Firebase, with graph data structures and a decentralized
architecture. Please give us an email so we can help, mine is mark@gunDB.io .

------
Ernestas
Whole Clojure and ClojureScript ecosystem.

~~~
afhammad
As much as I love Clojure this is not entirely true. Without naming names
there are some prominent projects/devs that would not qualify for this.

~~~
raspasov
If you're going to make statements like that, you should point names or at
least specific cases.

I would say, yes, Clojure is pretty much governed by the benevolent dictator
model. Is that bad? What is the alternative? Design-by-committee model where
the language/project/library goes in 100 different directions with mostly
questionable quality?

~~~
clj-throwaway
Personally I think Clojure takes the benevolent dictator model too far. It's
possible to be a benevolent dictator and still publish patches for review
before you merge them, even if you do intend to have the final say. Rich just
runs git commit && git push without telling anyone what he's working on. Most
of the time it works out but in the most recent development cycle it's been
kind of a mess.

~~~
raspasov
Ok, clj-throwaway : ) .

First, I have to say that I'm not a Clojure contributor, and haven't
contributed a line of code.

I am "just" a Clojure user. Clojure by itself is already pretty good. Nothing
is perfect of course. I want Clojure to keep improving in all kinds of ways
(smaller memory footprint than C, please? when can I get THAT? oh, can you
also throw in the 1 ms startup time, thanks :)), but I also want it to work
well, including my existing and previous code. When something is already
pretty good, you work twice as hard at not screwing it up first before you
mess too much with it.

What specifically do you mean by "mess"? What has been "messed up"? Has your
Clojure code stopped working? Has it become slower with a new release? Has
there been a glaring memory leak that renders your server useless after a few
hours of running? Because I can point you to a number of "open-source"
projects with huge funding where that has been the case.

------
kristopolous
I try to be excessively polite but I preside over a diaspora as opposed to a
proper community.

------
zengr
ElasticSearch in my experience has a smart team and good codebase to work on
in Java.

------
applerebel
Ruby for sure. Amazing community with super awesome OSS software.

------
purpleidea
Oh-My-Vagrant does: [https://github.com/purpleidea/oh-my-
vagrant](https://github.com/purpleidea/oh-my-vagrant) Disclaimer: I started
the project though!

------
srathi
Samba has a very supportive and vibrant team [0].

[0] www.samba.org

------
balbenberg
[https://github.com/themanaworld](https://github.com/themanaworld)

------
kmfrk
The Jekyll folks are always nice and chipper. And disgustingly productive. :)

------
fevangelou
You'd expect someone would mention Joomla already. But...

------
reitanqild
Netbeans and dokku are two nice ones as far as I understand

------
geppy
Elm and Blockly.

------
doppp
The Haxe community is pretty awesome! :)

------
lucasvr
The team at GoboLinux.org is awesome ;)

------
insulanian
F#

------
neelkadia
Android !!

------
kang
Bitcoin

------
dllthomas
Snowdrift.coop is very welcoming.

------
mholt
Check out #FreeSoftwareFriday on Twitter for praise of great open source
projects.

------
nickysielicki
In general I think that projects that use gerrit are the easiest to get
involved with.

------
juanmatt
[https://github.com/DemocracyOS/democracyos](https://github.com/DemocracyOS/democracyos)

Great team & Great project

------
alexfisher
Drupal - [http://drupal.org](http://drupal.org)

Ethereum - [http://ethereum.org](http://ethereum.org)

------
franzunix
I think it depends on you background, I'm trying to support this project:
[https://github.com/franzejr/best-ruby](https://github.com/franzejr/best-ruby)

------
szadok
Theforeman -Foreman is a complete lifecycle management tool for physical and
virtual servers. theforeman.org github.com/theforeman

------
jstoiko
Aren't these mandatory qualities in the open source world?

If you enjoy Python, RESTish APIs and all sorts of database backends, you can
checkout [http://Ramses.tech](http://Ramses.tech) a project that I'm involved
with.

------
SFjulie1
The day open source will be kind is the day there will be no more discussions.

When there is no more discussions and everything looks nice the project as
either became proprietary (apache, mysql, nginx), mummified dead (tex) or
religious dead (GNU+HURD), or soon to be kind of proprietary (mongodb) or dead
of shame (rails) or dead by tyranny (openBSD) or it is a zombie (perl6) or
dead from laughing (agile) or dead by bloat (node, angular, react, riak).

Well, Choose 2/3 kind & supportive open source alive

For example the consensus on PHP is vastly due to either true pro making real
money out of fixing the mess of PHP spaghetti code, and people having real
better tools to make better code.

PHP is thus a good example of a dead project that ignores it.

PHP is quantically dead.

~~~
aikah
> PHP is quantically dead.

PHP 7 is a revolution by itself, cleaning up a lot of issues in the language
and moving it forward. I'm not sure what your message is about, but it
certainly seems you have issues with the PHP team.

