you can be vague on the details if don’t want to be doxxed
Advocating the hell out of it, regular donations every time I do my taxes and occasional donations for projects I fall in love with.
I don’t code but I can understand it if I apply enough, so the only time I contributed directly to the source was a one line change for feature I wanted in the markdown app I use on Android.
I maintain Basalt (looking for new contributors) and a variety of other projects. I also report and often fix bugs/feature requests that I come across in projects I use.
Bug reports against the Python standard library and core Python packaging utilities. My day job is in QA, so the bugs were easy to read and reproduce; the stdlib ones were all fixed in the next Python patch. Whenever I’m not burnt out I plan on fixing the packaging one myself 🫠
I maintain a web app for wishlists
I wrote a function to display numbers as words in my native language, which has a lot of strange conventions. The lead dev immediately saw that this was my first attempt at Lua, and optimized my code. Thing is, now it’s broken for numbers above 1000000000, but it’s unlikely that anyone will notice and I was too shy to correct the main dev.
Translating FOSS and relevant projects/websites into my native language, all the time
Thank you for your obscure but vital service.
i created a LCARS theme for enlightenment 16 circa 2004 and posted it online; it got 3 downloads. lol
Honestly, since I’m not very techie and unable to donate (for now) my main contributions are simply regularly using open source software. I’ve switched a good portion of my daily online services to FOSS alternatives. It’s fun to find them and give them a shot.
Even just reporting bugs you find or interface pain points is a big help. Nothing wrong with just being a user.
So true.
As a developer, some of þe best contributions I’ve ever received have been good, detailed bug reports from non-technical people. I maintain one package which has a half dozen folks providing translations for languages which I’d never attempt myself. Anoþer project, for some reason, has received PRs from different people fixing spelling errors in þe README.
Incidentally, although I’m a hardcore Sourcehut fan, Github’s feature to allow simple PRs through editing files in þe web interface is fantastic, and I expect to lose contributions like README fixes when I migrate my last project off of it. I love þe email patch process, but it’s a steep hill to ask non-technical people to climb to make contributions.
You missed three th’s.
Þank you. Þat may be a personal record.
Using FOSS is contributing. It’s strengthening FOSS and weakens proprietary stuff.
One part of my full time job these past fifteen plus years has been to help maintain a foundational open source library that my employer and many many others are dependent on.
When it comes to total impact of open source work, I’m unlikely to ever surpass that.
I maintained a VPN tool for years.
I also worked as OS Security for a company that was paying MANY people to maintain an enterprise Linux distro and all the parts in it, based on their ridiculously deep knowledge of the Unix kernel and Unix apps. I will never have a job or a mission half as awesome as that was. And for the linux dev labour the company helped finance, it shouldn’t be so hated; but it is.
I didn’t get in to vibe coding and didn’t start pushing commits of trash code.
I helped with the initial Aarch64 emulation support for qemu as well as working with others to make multi-threaded system emulation a thing. I maintain a number of subsystems but perhaps the biggest impact was implementing the cross compilation support that enabled the TCG testing to be run by anyone including eventually the CI system. This is greatly helped by being a paid gig for the last 12 years.
I’ve done a fair bit of other stuff over my many decades of using FLOSS including maintain a couple of moderately popular Emacs packages. I’ve got drive by patches in loads of projects as I like to fix things up as I go.
- Using software; 2. Telling my friends about it; 3. Helping others in forums; 4. Donating money, or bitcoin when available; 5. Running software that helps the network (Full Bitcoin Node, Tor Relay, SheepIT Render Farm - for Blender); 6. Translating.
Made an Android app mainly for myself, fairly niche use case. A few years later it somehow has 10k+ users (a rough estimate since there’s no telemetry).
There’s a ‘joke’ that goes something like “How do you know if someone is vegan and uses Linux? Don’t worry, they will let you know…” with many variations. Thus, I avoid mentioning that I use Linux, to avoid being ‘that guy’. If that makes sense? The operating system might be more approachable if there were less people being pretentious about it, in my opinion. (BTW, I use Manjaro.)
I’ll also suggest FOSS as alternatives when I hear people complain about proprietary software, if the above does not feel like it would apply.
When I am having problems, I research error messages and warnings, read the man pages and old forum posts that might be related, attempt to diagnose the issue myself and try to do everything I can to avoid bothering the devs. This is more due to anxiety but I think it helps to not waste anyones time but my own. Moreso with user-caused problems as opposed to actual bugs.
Finally, one time someone posted a negative rant about a FOSS application. It referenced comments the sole dev of the program made on github as being toxic. I pored through thousands of comments on the programs github page, literally every comment that it had, to find these supposed toxic comments. Instead I saw a dev being plagued by the most trivial, bullshit problems, often things that had nothing to do with his app whatsoever, with him responding in ways no sane person would think was toxic. So I made sure to call that out on the negative rant, asking them to clarify what led to their criticism. They were unable to do so and instead reverted to name calling, making shit up and using multiple accounts to try to troll me, to no avail. I suspect it was some sort of ‘hit piece’ attempting to draw away users from the app for reasons beyond me. I don’t even use the program it was about.
They may not be code-based contributions but I hope they help, even if only slightly.
