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by ascar
1547 days ago
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The best motivation is a need for yourself or your job. If you're using open source and inevitably find bugs or missing features start with opening good and thorough issues for them. That's already a (minor) contribution that is more often appreciated than not. Then ask if the maintainers are open to accept a PR for the issue and if they say they are go on and do the work. Expect feedback and criticism on the PR and respect that it's the maintainers that have to deal with your contribution once it's merged. If you do all that in a respectful manner, it usually will be appreciated and you will have given something back. Another option is to just start your own project if you encounter something that is missing, possibly during your job, and get permission to open source that. |
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I maintain a couple open source projects and one of them solved a business need for my employer back then. I asked permission and got clearance to contribute my work to open source.
The project solves a rather small very specialized problem that any other option didn't sufficiently. I had initially written it to replace a central part of another open source project that was just way to inefficient. Instead of just adding the code there, I created a standalone library that then got used by that project. That way I was putting less burden on the maintainer of the bigger project by reducing his code base and taking over that part in a separate project. As it was also open source he could always fork it and adjust if necessary and the change was completely compatible with previous versions, just that it was two orders of magnitude more performant. On top of that others could use my project standalone if they only required that functionality.
By now it's multiple years old, has been downloaded nearly 10 million times, requires nearly no support (it's that simple), has less than 10 stars on Github, but is used in hundreds of projects on Github.
Of course, I'm proud of it and I consider it a success story of open source without too much sustained effort.