fame and fortune from open source
DESCRIPTION
Why get involved in open source development, how to get started, and what to expect.TRANSCRIPT
Run-down
• Who am I?
• What is Open Source? Who uses it?
• Why get involved?
• How to get started?
• How do the projects work?
• Fame & fortune
Rob
• Founder & CTO of Koordinates
• making geospatial data more accessible
• One Track Mind
• Navman
• UoA business school
• BE (Computer Systems)& BCom (Operations Mgmt)
Rob
• Been involved as an OSS user for 8 years
• Contributing significantly for the past two years
• Mainly: Dojo, Django, Geospatial apps
• Google Summer of Code organiser
What is Open Source?
• a community of people collaborating to create software
Who uses it?
• everyone
• developers, out of their own self-interest
• “We make muck so you don’t have to”Jeff Bezos, Amazon
OSS in Organisations
• use OSS
• develop with OSS (“muck”)
• use OSS as key technology
• support & develop OSS
Who develops it?
• always individuals
• people paid to work WITH it
• people paid to work ON it
• orgs who founded the software
• orgs who formed around the software
• people who aren’t paid at all
Why get involved?
• a product you work with and care about
• you want stuff fixed or added or improved
• help thy neighbour
• interesting & challenging
• fun!
How can you contribute?
• support
• documentation
• design
• opinions
• triage
• testing
• demos/examples
• moderating
• evangelising
• website
• infrastructure
• events/programmes
• code
How to get started?
• Actions speak louder than words
• Non-code contributions are critical
• What are you capable of?
• What are you interested in?
Starting points
• Mailing lists & forums
• File & triage bug reports
• Test pre-releases
• Write examples & demos
GHOP
• pre-University students
• 995 tasks across 10 projects
• 378 students
• 10 weeks
• pick up a task and do it
Silverstripe @ GHOP
• 62 students
• 173 completed tasks
6%
code33%
26%
7%2%1%
13%
12%
translation outreachtraining researchdocs user interfacecode quality assurance
Summer of Code
• University students
• 3 years:1500 students, 2000 mentors, 90 countries
• 2008:1125 students,175 projects
• May - August
Summer of Code
• “Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers”
• Challenging for projects & students
GSoC @ Dojo
• 6 projects
• 2 mentors
• dedicated admin
• weekly meetings
• mailing lists & forums
• meetups
• blog posts
• high profile
• get people using it
How OSS works
• Different for every project
BDFL
Steering Committee
Contributors
Community
Committers
Barriers
• You need to earn respect
• People aren’t scary
• You are good enough
Commitment
• This is voluntary
• People come and go
• Commitments change
Fame?
• projects fit into communities
• articles, blog posts, demos
• conferences
• ohloh.net
Can this pay me?
• Companies around the software
• creator
• offering support
• Companies who use the project
• Freelance
• Ping the developers list
Outcomes
• Get involved
• It’s easier than you expect
• Have fun :)
• Opportunities for students & graduates
• Online mapping
• Python, Javascript, C/C++
• distributed systems
• open source