[LRUG] Paths to open source contributions

[Tom Lea]

Hi,
	My OSS contributions come in the following categories:

1) Bugs or missing features in existing projects (usually rails  
patches). These
are usually things I had to work around in my day to day work, then  
patch up
in my "Thursday afternoon time" [1].

2) Original plugins and gems. These are things I needed to do day to  
day work,
and extracted out as plain old good practice. My employer (Reevoo) is  
more
than happy to let us open source or publish any general purpose code  
we write [2],
so they get thrown up into small github projects, and occasionally get  
polished as
part of Thursday afternoon time.

3) Sites I write in my spare time. Not sure how useful they are to the  
general
community, but when I'm using a 3rd party site, and it does not work  
how I
want it to, it's nice to be able to contribute to fixing it.
(examples: something I worked on: http://hasmygembuiltyet.org/, and  
from earlier today: http://tinyurl.com/d5mz6v ).

Whenever I plan to start an open source project, it always ends up  
unloved an unfinished... which is bad. So don't do that.

- Tom Lea

[1] Developer Thursday afternoons are dedicated to community projects,  
or none planned/scheduled work of our choosing.
[2] This can be justified to your bosses as simple free, cheep PR.

On 7 May 2009, at 15:23, Roland Swingler wrote:

> Hi,
>
> My OSS contributions have been paltry, rather than impressive, so take
> what I say with a pinch of salt. I've been motivated a little by all
> of the things you suggest - some were driven by trying to get a better
> feel for a project or type of project (jRuby for example - which sort
> of fits with your option 3), others were motivated by needing to fix a
> problem in an existing library or finding that something you've built
> might be useful to others (options 1 & 2). What I haven't done (yet)
> is set out from the beginning to "create an open source project to do
> X": for me it seems a little more unplanned than that.
>
> Cheers,
> Roland
>
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Vahagn Hayrapetyan  
> <vahagnh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,-
>>
>> I've been browsing the often impressive open source contributions  
>> of some of
>> the Rails / Ruby luminaries when it struck me that I don't really  
>> understand
>> how most open source projects originate. Essentially what I'd like  
>> to know
>> is whether such contributions are most typically the bi-product of  
>> some main
>> development effort or are they conceptualized and implemented for  
>> their own
>> sake, from the very start.
>>
>> So if you have open source contributions, I hope you'll shed some  
>> light as
>> to why you have them:
>>
>> You were solving a problem for yourself (a pet project perhaps),  
>> and ended
>> up with extra code that you released as open source;
>> You were working on someone else's problem (such as a client's),  
>> and ended
>> up with extra code that you released as open source;
>> You were bored and decided to make a contribution for the fun of it;
>> You were being strategic. You realized that for the Kool Kids to  
>> work with
>> you and the Beautiful People to go to bed with you, you NEED to  
>> have open
>> source contributions before we arrive at web 3.12. (This is the  
>> path I'm
>> feeling irresistibly pulled towards, by the force of destiny).
>>
>> As I realize that human behaviour is often influenced by several  
>> factors,
>> compound answers (such as 1&4; or 3&4) are of particular interest.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> / Vahagn
>>
>>
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