The meetup we had on Saturday, the 5th of February was fabulous. Here is the summary of what we learned:
We learned that Open source is a project(software or development project) that allows contribution, alteration, fixing of bugs e.t.c from third parties. It is also known as OSS(open source software).
What differentiate open source from other projects is that, Open source has Licence that allows contributors to modify or alter open source projects.
They are three types of Licenses, they include; the permissive license, the restrictive or copy left license and the service side public license.
Why should we contribute to open source? we need to contribute to open source inorder to; enhance our learning coast, satisfy our desires from being lonely, to network and connect with like minds in the industry, get mentorship, we all need someone to guide us at some point in life. we also contribute inorder for our cv to be robust and finally for the swags and funds attached.
Measures of contributing to open source; through documentation, design, security, translation, coding, community, advocacy, formatting, bug fixing and features suggestion.
Open source is not only for the code guys, everyone can contribute to open source you dont have to learn how to code!
Gateways to contributing to open source as a documentation specialist; search for queries and documentations that you feel needs some adjustments propose to edit and rewrite such documents. As a documentation specialist, you dont need to feel unwanted because documentation has proven to be the backbone of any open source project. People wont come to know a project exist without documentation.
As a designer, you can contribute to open source by looking out at Open Source Design to know companies that are on open source and may need your design contributions.
Also, as a security expert, you can help secure projects on open source by searching for security vulnerabilities in OSS projects and repos.
For the many Coders in the industry, you already know what your job is. You contribute to open source by coding, so one needs to learn some programming languages to be able to contribute in this area.
How to start contributing to OSS, Start by searching for projects on open source that is aligned with your skill and expertise, talk to project maintainers (the details of who a maintainer is will be discussed soon), you can also find new comer friendly bugs to fix by searching for first timer only on your browser, also, you may want to join the community to stay updated.
But before all this can take place, that is, before you start sorting for bugs to fix and problems to solve, you will need to learn what git and github is. Git are the codes that run on github while github is a platform where contributors can make their contribution.
And in Open source, Collaboration is key, you cant make contributions to open source without collabrating with fellow contributors. So learn collaboration as a skill, before starting your open sourcing journey.
Although it is good to open source, not all informatios are open sourced. Such informatios include; employees' data, Apikeys and credentials.
Lastly, the roles in Open source include: the maintainers, these are the Admin, Code publishers, Discord publisher and Social media managers. The Committers, people who contribute to VueJS, Go, Linux Distros and other OSS projects. Lastly, we have the contributors, these are the community members, mentors and project advocates.
Contributing to open source is a gateway to expanding your niche, why not start today!