Re: [OT]: Sort-of. What's the best way to "contribute"
On Wednesday 16 October 2002 14:58, deFreese, Barry wrote:
> Since my posts usually get ignored we'll see what happens with this one.
> :-)
>
> Since I don't have a great deal of money yet (When I win the lottery I
> promise to send big checks to Debian and Samba!! :-) ) what is the best way
> to contribute to the open source community? I've poked around on
> sourceforge to see if I could lend a hand but many of the projects that I
> found are probably a little over my head at this juncture. The initiative
> here is two-fold.
>
1) submit useful bug reports.
2) read existing bugs reports and offer help, suggestions, etc. Often
developers are unable to reproduce a bug and it is much harder to solve a bug
you can not see.
3) write tutorials, howtos, web docs, etc. Write a puff piece for freshmeat,
slashdot, etc.
4) join mailing lists and help out those just starting. Read what other
people say. You can learn a lot this way.
5) find a bug that is bothering you and try to fix it. Focus just on it. If
it is obviously too hard of a bug see if you can find a smaller one.
Alternatively try to add in a feature you are missing. Again start small.
I always tell people on this list that a few helpful bug reports more than
pays a new user's entrance fee into Debian. Same goes for upstream software.
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