Existing established open source projects? Basically never.
My own piles of shit with open source licenses? All the time.
Same here; also I once sent vim, the FreeBSD Foundation, & Thunderbird $5 each.
Similar. But I do contribute by adding things I want to some projects I use if it's simple enough.
And my pile of shit has like 40 stars, so maybe I have one or two other users besides me.
I try to contribute as much info as I can to Open Street Map on my walks.
Is there an app that makes this easier to do? I want to contribute but I don't see a setting or option in osmand
Have you heard of StreetComplete on Android?
!openstreetmap@lemmy.ml has couple of post about apps
I use street complete, every door, and vespucci depending on what I want to map
104 contributions in last year on codeberg, 52 contributions on github (some are duplicated from codeberg due to mirroring), some more in other places.
I like to think that using FOSS daily, singing its praises to everyone and filing out the occasional bug report counts.
It does. I wish more people recognized that bug reports are contributions.
Probably only 1% of users file bug reports. That means for every 100 times a bug is found by a user, 99 of them won't bother reporting it. Devs can't fix a bug they dont know about...
I think it depends on the project. Some maintainers really only want extremely comprehensive bug reports that realistically only another dev could produce. All kinds of logs, sometimes requiring special packages installed to produce them.
Which makes sense because someone just saying "it crashes sometimes" doesnt provide much to go on.
No it doesnt XD
Going to time and effort to help improve something = contributing
Absolutely love others testing my code for me because they find things I would've never run into myself
I'm using StreetComplete to contribute to OpenStreetmap almost daily.
Does that count?
Same here, there is tons of work to be done
Yes!
@const_void every time i think i can help a project with a feature i need
code: null, nada, nothing. dunno how issues: maybe 30 in 9 years using gnu/linux money: 1% of my income for 5 years now, to whatever project i find cool, mostly smaller ones tho
I hope to one day, but I don't have any programming skills to speak of
There are many ways to contribute. I actually read an article about that a couple of days ago, maybe it will be of interest to you, too: https://github.com/readme/featured/open-source-non-code-contributions
I actually want to learn enough code to contribute, but there's this gap between "how to code" and "how to participate in a modern software project".
Like, I've created plenty of little things. Discord bots, automation scripts, plenty of sysadmin stuff for work, etc. But like, I clone a git repo cause there's a home assistant bug I'd like to fix for example, and I'm immediately lost on where to start.
That's a really great article, thank you for the link! That was informative and educational and I am a fan.
I can't code either but I'm supporting new users in selected forums on a daily basis and I volunteer at our local linux event once a year.
My job is contributing to the building of an open source project full of shared tools and resources for businesses in my industry to share. I am part of a team of skilled developers and citizen developers across my industry that work to create shared FOSS tools to make all of us more efficient at our work.
So about 60 hours per week.
Its practically been all my free time in the past 14 years
☝️ the Man
My main hobby is designing and programming embedded devices, and anything I create gets slapped up on my github in case anyone else can use it. Schematics, code, whatever.
I have a side hustle of selling the PCBs I make, but I have absolutely no problems with someone making a clone of my designs. It's not like they're super advanced tech. Anyone can figure out what I've figured out.
As much as I can. I can't code at all and don't work in IT, but at least I try to help newcomers as much as I can, publish my work as OS license, try to heat up as much traffic as I can on Lemmy (especially for non-tech stuff) and report bugs whenever I find them.
I can't do much more :(Since for the most part i still suck at programming; i help translating programs in my main language since i needed to learn english for my job regardless.
Good on ya
At the moment never.
I donate ~30$ a month divided over a few projects but I want to donate more once I can and also to bigger things that would donate for me to many projects and not just the ones that I think of (please give suggestions to such projects or foundations!)
I think thats called taxes!
There should be more government funding for floss. Both by prioritizing floss projects to use and direct funding to projects that arent useful to govts.
True, but until then
- I have commits accepted to major projects you have heard of. Mainly because I have no patience for a poorly worded README.
- I co-maintain a couple of mildly popular things you almost certainly haven't even heard of.
- I solely maintain a half dozen utilities that are only used by myself and some brave souls who randomly found them on GitHub.
TL;DR: I am an open source hipster, because "you probably haven't heard of" my work, but I think it's pretty keen.
Monthly donations and code once in a while when I run into a bug or require a feature and have time.
Every year, around Christmas I donate to a project that I use a lot. Also some projects more than once (wikipedia, Signal)
I'd guess about monthly to bimonthly, in the sense of submitting a fix for an issue that affects/concerns me/my use of open source projects.
I've created one project that no one uses. I've found a lot of friction contributing to existing projects. There has to be:
- something to do
- the maintainer is cool with having it done
- the maintainer is okay not doing it themselves
- is within my expertise or requires an acceptable amount of ramp up learning
Then I have to make sure to learn their code of conduct and do it exactly the way they want. Do they want testing? Do they want me to update the docs? So I have to get green light from maintainer to start? Etc.
I write a lot of my own software and open source it. And very few of those projects ever have/get any contributions from anyone else. In fact, most of the recent ones literally only have one commit out on Gitlab. And it's pretty rare that I contribute to existing open source projects.
Many years ago, I contributed as part of my job a fair amount to a some WYSIWYG documentation writing web app associated with the Gentoo project. I think that web app is long-since dead and gone. (Not my fault, I promise. Lol.)
Oh, also, I wrote a lot of code as part of the same job that I was always promised would be open sourced, but I kindof had to leave without pushing that issue and that code hasn't ever been open sourced. It's bullshit that still bothers me today, but there's nothing really that I can do about it now. The place is out of business. I could theoretically contact the guy who was in charge (he would have inherited all of that company's intellectual property and would have the right to open source it now), but that guy's the kind of person I'd much rather never have any contact with again. It's a whole thing.
Since then, nothing concrete I can think of.
Semi-regularly.
I fairly often send patches for small bug fixes and features. I also maintain a few packages in nixpkgs. I also forked an abandoned project to provide some fixes and updates, so I maintain that now.
I also try to give a donation to an open-source project that I use every couple of months.
I also have a bunch of my own projects that I released as open source, but I don't think that is really what the question is asking.
Almost daily to the Jellyfin Roku client.
Come join us if you want to work on some cool crap!
Thank you very much, I've been noticing it's been getting a lot of good little updates recently
Yeah, we altered our releases so we could get bug fixes out quicker - separate from features.
In fact, 2.0.5 is scheduled for release tomorrow 🤘
cool crapfree software😊 I've heard it both ways. 🍍
Whenever I can. Currently I‘m a bit short on change so I just contribute work. Did some translations, filed bugs, raised awareness and helped others use open source software. I also try to learn to code good enough to fix things in projects but I‘m not there yet.
I've created/maintain 5 programs for this rather niche but rather popular Linux based tablet. All of my programs exist to give the owners more freedom with their device and gives users a plausible way to avoid uploading all of their data to the company's cloud. I created installation scripts but also packed the programs into the community package manager. The programs are all feature complete so I hop on every other week or so for basic maintenance and to test how my programs work after the tablet updates. I'm pretty much always around to help users troubleshoot.
Past that I have a few random contributions to OSS I use for bugs I've identified and have been able to fix.
Not often but I have a moment where I do. Last year I contributed a plugin for MusicBrainz Picard which allows you to submit your genre tags to MusicBrainz. I want to give it a proper good update in the future but I'm so focused on other things right now.
I used to contribute more when I was at a job where I was unsatisfied. Python was my first language that I really enjoyed writing, regardless of the occasional warts. There are other many other languages I enjoy. Instead, the job had me writing shitty Ant code when I could write code. So I would contribute to OSS projects in my spare time. Now that I'm at a job where my creative juices get flowing on a regular basis, I contribute less. Most of my contributions have been related to a work project that needs this or that fixed upstream. That would have been impossible previously, since we had a big steaming pile of shitty Ant code that had been written from scratch. No upstreaming fixes for that because it had very minimal dependencies.
Problem for me is I'll write code in computercraft or Garry's mod when I'm bored like that which isn't really of any help to anyone
About 35.0% of my waking life is contributing to FOSS.
Mostly its filing bug reports. Sometimes I write my own code
I am a dev but I always find it hard to get into the code of opensource projects so I am never able to contribute. I hope I can understand how to figure this one day.
At least weekly.
Practically every day.
Don't do NixOS kids...
Data for open street map, open voice, open assistant, some translation issues, bug reports, and small bug fixes
So I would say couple things a month
i made two issues and a small pull request once, haven't donated money to any foss yet but i should and i will when possible.
I've done a few documentation contributions for some projects. Turns out that technical writers and editors are appreciated in certain places.
Its also horrible lacking in most projects (cough Lemmy)
Sadly, I've contributed docs to some projects only to have the devs delete it. They profited off of their hosting solution, so the wanted it to be unclear how to self host it
Way too often. Maintainers wish I didn't...
Only GPL protected code. I mostly create issues and update documentation
If it's something easy to fix or add, worth the time to make a pull request.
Otherwise mostly bug reports and feature requests lol
Like once or twice a year I will open pull requests to libraries I use that have problems or missing features.
Not good enough :(
So far, once.
I regularly do bug reports. I would contribute more, but I simply don't have the time.
This but I don't have time or knowledge.
Most of the time is translations but from time to time is a tiny bit of code.
A few times a month. I am active with issue reporting and fixes for some Godot extensions and React projects. I've also opened source my own crap.
I rarely find a situation where I need a feature that doesn't exist that's important enough to me to implement it myself. It's a heck of a lot easier to just, for example, purchase things that already work with an existing home assistant integration.
I suppose I could contribute with bug fixes and such, but I have a lot of hobbies that I'm already busy with, and I do development work as my main job.
I mostly write bug reports as my code is not up to par with most projects and my native language is always already translated...
If using open source projects and sharing my experience by helping others on forums and logging detailed bugs when I find them counts as contribution, then everyday.
I'm a software dev myself, but I have enough on my plate with my day job and two kids that have to be taken to all manner of activities. I don't know how all these people find the time to work on free software, probably for little to no compensation, but my hat is off to all of you, wherever you are.
Sometimes, Issues in software that I'm interested. I don't code, just very simple shell scripting. For that reason I have a GitHub account, and other one in Gitlab that I did for just 1 project.
Never. The few times I've tried the community was just too toxic.
A few times per year. Mostly janitorial work.
