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by ubermajestix
5614 days ago
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I think contributing to open source is more about "fixing a broken window" than a service finding me projects it thinks I should work on or that have lots of broken windows. I have more than enough things that I should work on, and when I contribute to open source its always because the tools available didn't work for me. GitHub makes it pretty easy to find projects you're interested in and pretty easy to start contributing code to those projects, so I guess I don't get it. Why would I want to contribute to someone's project that I don't even use? What would inspire me to all of the sudden want to hack on git's internals and then not dive into the source? On one hand, yeah, finding some menial bug or documentation fix I can work on to start contributing to a project is great, but at the higher levels just presenting tasks from issue trackers for me to smash, I don't think is a great idea. Look at the ActiveRecord/AREL rewrite, sure @tenderlove was just squashing bugs in the Lighthouse tracker but only because, as he says, "AT&T Interactive started paying me to work on Rails" (http://engineering.attinteractive.com/2010/10/arel-two-point...) If you don't dive in real deep you can't really make things better and that takes a lot of time. You end up investing a lot in the project and the people around the project. So I don't see where GitHub doesn't support this. How does your product makes any of this any easier/better/more full of awesome? |
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An example from my experience: before I started working on Rubygems' testing infrastructure, I wanted to contribute to Rails, but didn't know where to start. The Lighthouse tracker is a bit intimidating without anyone to point you in the right direction. If there was a place I could go and find small "get your feet wet" tasks to then get to a point where I can rewrite major components, then I would have started contributing much earlier in my career. The way I got into doing things for Rubygems was via a friend: I got a direct request to help with a new project for Rubygems. I didn't know what needed to be done so I never helped out previously.
Githacking wants to be what that friend was for me: a way to contribute with no friction on either the maintainer's side or the contributer's side and a clear starting place for getting involved in a new project.
Taking that a step further: a major part of the platform will be feature requests from companies that depend on the project, not unlike the bounties large open source projects put out from time to time on a bug or feature. Companies request a feature from a project, it gets implemented, the contributer gets paid the bounty.