Through my experience with developers and open source experts, I found something very curious. In the end, all I have seen are power users. Usually the computer enthusiast is divided by developers and users, however there are so called developers, but they are really users of a language. But (at least in public) they are only users of a language, their open source expertise as far as using Linux as their developer platform doesn’t exceed to the contribution part on not just their favorite language (which will probably be done on a different language) but to other projects built on that language.
The sad reality is that open source enthusiast don’t always grab the concept of a community. Usually community becomes something that is more socially accepted as a user group, even their blogs usually focus on new libraries, technologies and modules to use. Rarely is about a project community where gyrate around a source tree, with a product that is compiled and released on a scheduled manner.
So, for example, Big Joe who is a great FLOSS advocate and use PHP-MySQL for all it’s clients and do it on his GNU/Linux servers and wears a Ubuntu t-shirt and give advices on why everyone should use Linux. He has even gave talks about PHP development techniques, security on the language and gives the green light to trying new modules and frameworks for its development.
Yet Big Joe, however, has never imagine on even getting in touch with the people at PHP.net, has never even compiled the source code of the language, or know how to. He doesn’t even know who build what part of the language. In his head, he might even ridicule the idea of taking time off his clients to dedicate in such a task, as the language is good enough, for his needs.
When confronted, Big Joe admits that his knowledge of PHP would be useless that looking at the source tree is based on another language, C. However given his big and deep knowledge of PHP, he should be able to look elsewhere where PHP is proven to be the language of choice, a project like Drupal, which is a very popular CMS could present somewhere where he should feel more competent to work upon. The Drupal source code is in fact made out of pure PHP code, many hundred of lines of code.
Big Joe now has 2 problems, how will he be able to read all that source code? And where should he start?
Maybe Big Joe would feel Drupal is a waaaay too big of a bone to chew on. So he has other options. Sourceforge has hundred of projects of different size to contribute to. Projects like DokuWiki, or even lesser known projects that could use his help.
So Big Joe found his project where he can read up easily and contribute with his magnificent PHP skills. However there is another problem, Big Joe also doesnt know how to start. And here is where the real learning needs to happen. For all his years of apt-get install and tar -xzvf or unzip -r modules and libraries. He would now need to learn some base new technology.
First one will help him communicate with developers, and will prove to be the most used and is called mailman. This help him keep in touch with the whole team of developers, however he will also see other users as he subscribe to the commit list which automagically email him all the changes to the code.
The next piece of technology is the wiki, where most of the documentation to get started, as well as some design pointers are already documented on these places. Is important that he check its out while joining the community to avoid being outcast from acting far from the status quo.
Finally the big and more developer-like piece is the code repository where the commits and builds he do himself should be commited and approved. Big Joe will found a new family of activities including:
- QA, test new patches from others and give follow up.
- Managing branches, in git this could become an all day task if the project get busy.
- Verify bugs, evaluating bug reports and finding the issue is another big developer task.
- Building, having cyclical builds and maintaining the successful build is another task that give some sense of stability, coding bugs might raise some flags, that something somewhere is not really working.
- Documenting, as a user documentation is important, however as a developer, a good technical documentation can help people do their work more efficiently.
Big Joe found that contributing isn’t as hard as he thought initially, and now he has become someone with a say in a real free software project. Now Big Joe will dedicate some time to encourage people to step into this level of contribution, and maybe he could get his USER group into a real developer group and do cool stuff like a bug hunt, or a development spring.
Big Joe is very well networked withing the community and can now have some real hold on not just promoting FLOSS but actually being part of producing floss.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 