Kanishk's Blog
OSS Open source

Kickstart with Open-Source

Many folks usually have a query about how can one contribute to open source, what is open source and how can they start with it.

I feel everyone should contribute to open-source software and should know what's the power of open-source software.

What open source is basically?

As this has the word "Open" which means open obviously, I mean accessible to everyone. This simply means anyone can view the source code suggest changes raise an issue and become a contributor to that project.

How to contribute?

Now comes the question of how can one contribute to #OSS. There can be multiple ways one can contribute to open source software if you are a beginner you can contribute to documentations, look for typos or do anything you feel like, remember one thing even a dot counts as a contribution. Things to notice when you start your journey to OSS:

  1. Look for a project with a good number of stars, which is popular and keeps on maintaining daily.
  2. Once you select your project now comes what to contribute if you don't have anything. Every good OSS has "good-first-issue" for beginners who want to contribute search for that and work on that.
  3. You can contribute inside documentation of that project, look for the issues raised, and see if you can contribute.
  4. Typos! its human nature to make mistakes this can be beneficial for you, kidding 😂. Look for grammatical errors or any typos in that project to suggest the changes.
  5. Try to keep your commits small there can be a possibility that you have added a single line but your changes may show hell lot of changes done, like if you change the indentation changes will reflect more as usual.

Before contributing reading the contribution instruction is a must. Every OSS project has a CONTRIBUTION.md file attached that says what process you need to follow if you want to contribute make sure you follow them.

Whenever you raise a PULL REQUEST then try to explain everything like:

  1. What was the problem?
  2. What motivated you?
  3. What changes have you done?
  4. Any constrain for the changes you are doing.

Focus on these points and you are good to go.

Licensing:

Suppose you have open-sourced your project there can be a possibility that anyone can copy your project and give his name, well there are licensing in open source software which you can add according to your constraint.

Available license:

  1. Apache
  2. MIT
  3. BSD
  4. GNU
  5. Mozilla Public Licence
  6. Common Development and Distribution
  7. Eclipse Public License

For more details of licensing refer https://opensource.org/licenses

I like OSS and have contributed to OSS to organizations like Microsoft, formik, GraphQL, Facebook, and many more.

So why to wait just start your OSS journey and keep sharing your win-win story.

Useful? 😍

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