Contributing
Contributing for non - coders
Aaron Peters, who is a coding tinkerer at best, describes some ways that non-technical folks can contribute to open source projects.
KDE’s Visual Design Group provides styles and imagery you can use to mock up your own idea.
Image credit: Getty images
It takes a village to run an open source project, or so the saying goes. Or would, if software were a thing back when that saying came to be. It nevertheless still applies to open source, which moves forward thanks to the efforts of contributors around the world.
Specifically, thousands of developers write millions of lines of code to create all the components that make up our favourite operating system. From the kernel to base utilities to desktops and applications, many of these contributors volunteer their time to improve and grow the FOSS ecosystem.
But even more people use the software, but aren’t developers. If you, like the author, are among this group, how do you go about lending a hand? In this article, we’ll explore a variety of ways you can pitch in to help an open source project, none of which requires writing a single line of code. And what’s more, the work you do can actually benefit you as well. It’s a win-win!
Creating open source software requires a number of skill sets. We’ll look at some of these in terms of the value they bring to the project, as well as what skills and tools you need to get started.
1 Quality assurance
Commercial entities have a fiduciary duty to their customers to produce software that’s free of defects. Open source has a similar responsibility, but projects likely don’t have funds to staff a quality assurance (QA) department with people dedicated to testing. Open source projects are always looking for contributors to help make sure the software is as bug-free as it can be.
An easy way to help is to report bugs you find in the software you use. Projects often manage their work in issue-tracking systems. For example, the Fedora Project welcomes bug reports on the Red Hat Bugzilla site (https://bugzilla.redhat.com). If you find something wrong with the software you’re using, you can submit a description of it to the dev team in a few simple steps.
Before logging your bug, make sure it isn’t a known issue. It’s a good idea to check any ‘troubleshooting’ or ‘known issues’ list that might come with the software you’re using. You can search the Fedora list with the keywords that best describe your problem. Be as descriptive as you can, because the less precise the search, the more results you need to wade through. For example, if your system won’t boot after an upgrade and you search simply for ‘boot’, Fedora’s Bugzilla presents a list of over 1,500 items to slog through.