Opensource

What I really like to do in my spare time is electronics projects and tinker with microcontrollers. So I've contributed to a few libraries, added some features, tried to fix stuff and participated in a few smart-home projects. And I self-host some web services. There's always some mild annoyances or things I find out while doing the maintenance. And sometimes it's easy enough for me to do some changes myself and I send that to the project.

In my private life, I almost exclusively use Free and Open-Source Software. So if something on my computer doesn't work as expected, I write bug reports. Sometimes I already got to the root of the issue and if it's in a programming language I understand, I don't just file a bug-report but also propose the exact fix.

And some one-off things. During Covid I played Minetest and sent some pull requests out to some mods. And occasionally I see some abandoned (niche) Linux packages or projects and update them. Even if that doesn't get incorporated anywhere, people will at least have the steps to make it work again.

Generally, I'm not that invested in some specific project. It's more some smaller fixes here and there. I think people call these "drive-by commits". I might have some mild form of ADHD, or there's just too much interesting projects out there... But I've struggled homing in on any single one of them. And I can't muster up the time to maintain anything myself, that's just too much of a commitment.

And what I also do is participate in Linux forums or here on Lemmy. Just help people with their woes. Or help them make a decision on what software to use, etc... Aside from writing code, that's also a big and important part of Free Software culture.

My verdict is: Most people I meet are nice. Sometimes they're really interesting people with some crazy niche interests. Sometimes it's some dude from oversees having a job and kids and on the side they also maintain some software for the benefit of everyone. Or I want something fixed, propose something and go to bed, and when I wake up the next day, someone put in lots of thought and some time and fixed my stupid issues, or at least restructured their code so I can use their software how I like. And in the case of Minetest it was either some middle-aged people still invested in playing sandbox games, or some teenagers who were frankly not super adept at coding, but very open to suggestions and learning things. That's the outstanding positive encounters. I don't have that many negative ones. I'm not here for the drama, but like to keep things to the technical aspect. If someone isn't listening or an annoying person, I just don't engage. I mean usually I don't have to use their software. And I can't come up with any specific example that I was involved in. Usually my annoyances are either someone doesn't have the time anymore to maintain their project. But that's okay, interests change and sometime life takes a turn and you can't invest lots of time into everything. Or complexity. Sometimes it's tough to understand some complex software with lots of moving parts and that stops me from engaging, even if I want to. Yeah and I think I talked to a bunch of people who might be on the autism spectrum. I can't really tell but occasionally someone is super blunt and a bit different than people I meet on the street. I can see how being super honest and picking on someones ideas for technical reasons, or rejecting them, citing formalities can discourage newcomers. Honestly... I myself don't care. If someone is straightforward, I just take that as an invitation to be very direct myself. Usually these people are focused on the technical aspects and that aligns with me if I just want to use the technology. I can live with that as long as they give some justification for their reasoning. And usually they do. And it's rare anyways, at least in my experience. So rare that I forgot when I got annoyed by people after the next dozens of very positive encounters. Usually it's steep learning curves that put me off. But we can't do much about this except invest lots of time to write good documentation. And it's a technical problem and not a people-problem.

I'm theoretically against Codes of Conducts and politics in free software projects. I think we should stick to the technical aspects, just respect each other and don't waste each other's time. Be welcoming to contributions and don't care if it's a 14yo kid, a woman or whoever. Most projects get that right. They don't write pages and pages of text to describe their politics, but instead they just do it. I think that's the way to go. I think all of this goes without saying. And if we want to attract people, we should focus on writing documentation that helps them get started, instead of CoCs and GitHub bots that enforce them and make everything more complicated than it really is. But there are some limitations... Bigger projects might have to deal with politics.