[Novalug] Community contribution

[Jay Berkenbilt]

"Ken Kauffman" <kkauffman at headfog.com> wrote:

> I was sitting here thinking about those involved in "community" based
> projects such as Linux.  This isn't intended to be a judgment call
> type of question, but really a self-assessment type of thing.

Nice preface.  It takes all types.  I make lots of contributions, and
one of the reasons I do is because I have the technical expertise to
do so, and I feel that for every user like me, there are dozens or
hundreds who won't or can't contribute.

> - Contribute on a regular basis?

Yes.  As a debian developer, I end up as an intermediary between
debian users and upstream for the package I maintain.  I also have
some of my own open source projects (albeit with very small
followings) and have contributed small pieces of code to numerous
projects going back into the late 80s.  I couldn't even begin to
recount all of them, though searches on google and clusty.com make
good reminders. :-)

> - Take time to review code and contribute?

There are many packages that I beta test.  I used to beta test even
more, but I still make sure to run all the emacs pretests as well as
prerelease versions of the debian packages I maintain.  I used to run
all the Red Hat/Fedora prereleases, but now that I'm more debian
focused, I no longer do so.

> - Take time to do some "QA" (aka testing) and actually file bugs to
> assist projects?

Yes, I always take the time to report bugs no matter how small they
are, and I appreciate it when my users do the same.  There are many
minor features in many open source packages that are there because of
such bug reports or contributions.  I'll admit that this is, to some
extent, "enlightened self interest."  I like things to "just work" as
much as the next person, so if they don't, then I report bugs so that
they will in the future. :-)


> - Financially contribute/donate to projects for those that have taken
> the time?

I am a member of the free software foundation and also pick one open
source project to donate to every year.  I've done this for many
years.  The first one was to the X consortium.  I made a donation to
Lilypond one year.  I also donated to openvpn once, and to dvd+rw
tools.  I can't recall the others.  Generally I donate if there's some
package that I find enables me to abandon a commercial product in
favor of an open source one or enables me to do something I was
prepared to pay for.  In 2007, I donated to the linux ntfs project (I
can't remember the exact nature of the donation, but it was to "OSDN /
VA Software") after I used recent Linux ntfs support to recover all of
my wife's data from her hard drive which had bad blocks and couldn't
even be read in Windows.

> - Do you feel that your contributions, whether time or money are
> enough?

Yes, though I know people who do a lot more, and I have done more at
other times in my life than I do now.

The one thing I feel badly about is that I have a ton of really useful
stuff that I wrote and use myself.  I should really make it more
widely available.  This includes anything from little scripts that my
co-workers have started using and really like to a full-fledged PDF
library that can do all sorts of structural manipulations to PDF
documents including linearizing and encrypting them.  I wrote the code
at my last job and got written permission to release it as open
source, but I would need several days to make it stand-alone and make
it able to work with some more recent changes to the PDF spec.  I
still don't know of anything else out there comparable to it that
would have as unrestricted a license as mine would have.  There are a
lot of things my PDF library doesn't do that other code does, but
there are some interesting things it does do that other code doesn't,
including writing out PDF in a normalized form conducive to editing in
a text editor, if you're so inclined. :-) I also have some subversion
code for doing complex operations in a batch mode that I couldn't live
without, and I really think it's something people would want and use.
I've made a half-hearted attempt to get it "out there", and there are
two or three people who emailed me about it in response to posts they
found with searches, but that's all.  Anyway, I digress.

> This is not intended to be a flame and would like to limit this to
> intellectually stimulating conversation.  I just think it's valuable
> to remember the contributions of people and projects that make our
> lives easier through open source.

I'm glad you asked this question.  I personally feel that it's okay if
the vast majority of users never contribute anything back.  I think
most open source developers find that their work is its own reward.
At least this is how I feel, and it's a feeling I know is shared by
many others I've talked to.  It reminds me of something my wife says.
I play trumpet in a community band.  When people ask her whether she
plays an instrument, she says, "I play a very important role in the
band: I'm an audience member.  After all, where would the band be
without its audience?"  People who "just use" open source software and
never give anything else back either in the form of a donation of
money, code, or time should be able to keep right on using open source
software guilt-free.

-- 
Jay Berkenbilt <ejb at ql.org>