On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 10:45 PM, Jerome Gotangco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Ambrosio Berdijo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> "....(I still have a day job, y'know :) I'm afraid IPTraf doesn't put food >> on my table, heh heh)....." >> >> I wish I have the economic freedom to write FOSS code, so difficult in the >> Phils, >> specially when raising a family...(sigh) > > It shouldn't be that hard to contribute to FOSS. In my case, I do > contribute to some small projects, not necessarily code-related (most > are though), only because I do need them from work. Because my patch > becomes under the license of the mainline code, it is pretty much > being involved to FOSS and have a fulfilling career at the same time. > Depending on your employer and the tools you use, its most likely if > you are using free/open source software that your chance of > contributing to an actual project is higher compared to the rest. Also > because of online communities, especially freenode, collaboration > becomes quicker at the same time you get to interact with very clever > people elsewhere with the same interests. That itself is a powerful > technology flattener.
In just this past year alone, I've managed to not only contribute some FOSS code back to the community, but to write some new (albeit small) code as well. While initially just for $PLAY (e.g. script plugins for WeeChat,[0]) I also found myself contributing code that is helpful for $WORK (e.g. Tie::Amazon::S3.[1]) Sure, not any single one of them would probably earn me even a vertical meter of beer (at least, not for the moment ;) but these small projects of mine sure are useful for my daily grind: I am happy and hopeful that other people use my work. And indeed they do. [0] http://zakame.spunge.org/projects/weechat-plugins [1] http://search.cpan.org/dist/Tie-Amazon-S3 For me, the ultimate confirmation of being a FOSS contributor is when you find out that someone you don't know from Adam is using your code and adapting it for their needs, while at the same time sharing those changes back to the community. And that has happened to me: one of my little WeeChat scripts for doing IRC event notifications via Growl[2] was adapted by someone[3] to have it do remote notification over SSH.[4] [2] http://www.growl.info (yes, that is a Mac-only library, but hey, hacking it via Perl's Mac::Growl is fun ;) [3] http://blog.foosion.org/2008/02/15/libnotify-over-ssh [4] http://www.0x11.net/notify-remote/remote-notification.pl I think it doesn't really matter if you're doing (or want to do) FOSS because you do it as a hobby, or because your boss pays you to: what matters is that, to truly appreciate the FOSS effort, you ought have the will to contribute, no matter how small it is (lines of code, bug reports, requests for features or otherwise,) and the hope of looking forward to seeing other people making use of AND improving on your efforts (just as you use and improve other people's FOSS.) Sure, it may be hard now to maybe write a patch to fix a bug, or make some new code for a requested feature, because of many constraints (economic or otherwise,) but unless you take steps to move towards those goals (learning the ropes, talking to the devs, etc.,) you probably would be missing much on the value of FOSS and the manifold communities in it. Cheers, Zakame -- Zak B. Elep || http://zakame.spunge.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] || [EMAIL PROTECTED] || [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1486 7957 454D E529 E4F1 F75E 5787 B1FD FA53 851D _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
