this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Linux

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] onlinepersona 42 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lucky bastard!

(Thank you 😉 )

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (4 children)

It's more common than you might think. A lot of companies have open source codebases. In fact, I think almost every software engineer job I've had so far have had at least a little public code.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Existing established open source projects? Basically never.

My own piles of shit with open source licenses? All the time.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Same here; also I once sent vim, the FreeBSD Foundation, & Thunderbird $5 each.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I try to contribute as much info as I can to Open Street Map on my walks.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Same I’m mapping out my community and adding missing locations

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've been loving it. Weirdly scratches the same itch Pokémon Go did for a while, plus it's something actually useful.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Now you've got the idea of making a game around filling out open street map info. I'll add it too the list of "cool programs I don't have nearly enough time to make" 😔

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

StreetComplete is the one I use, although there's a handful. It's on both the play store and Fdroid

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

104 contributions in last year on codeberg, 52 contributions on github (some are duplicated from codeberg due to mirroring), some more in other places.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I like to think that using FOSS daily, singing its praises to everyone and filing out the occasional bug report counts.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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...

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I'm using StreetComplete to contribute to OpenStreetmap almost daily.

Does that count?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

@const_void every time i think i can help a project with a feature i need

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I hope to one day, but I don't have any programming skills to speak of

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] MXX53 18 points 9 months ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Its practically been all my free time in the past 14 years

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

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 :(

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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!)

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

At the moment never.

[–] MajorHavoc 11 points 9 months ago
  • 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Every year, around Christmas I donate to a project that I use a lot. Also some projects more than once (wikipedia, Signal)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

As often as a I can.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Almost daily to the Jellyfin Roku client.

Come join us if you want to work on some cool crap!

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] onlinepersona 8 points 9 months ago

Monthly donations and code once in a while when I run into a bug or require a feature and have time.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

About 35.0% of my waking life is contributing to FOSS.

Mostly its filing bug reports. Sometimes I write my own code

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Practically every day.

Don't do NixOS kids...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

At least weekly.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've done a few documentation contributions for some projects. Turns out that technical writers and editors are appreciated in certain places.

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