(Easy) ways to help struggling open source projects

lemmyreader@lemmy.ml to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 135 points –

  • step in and help review a few PRs

  • help the project triage/reproduce bugs

  • if code in the PR looks complicated or is hard to understand, ask for an explanation

  • express your gratitude to the maintainers

  • make your company sponsor projects they depend on

https://mastodon.social/@bagder/112194895793007918

Daniel is the creator of cURL : https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/03/30/howto-backdoor-curl/

15

Make your company sponsor projects they depend on

Definitely worth trying to do, but making my employer do anything isn’t likely!

I personally think you should move the fourth bullet (express your gratitude to the maintainers) to the first position in your list. But a great, simple list none-the-less.

is "step in and help review a few PRs" really that helpful? like... oh great, now this one person that i don't trust is telling me that the other person that i don't trust made some code that i should merge

How does one become trusted? If they regularly review and provide feedback that you agree with it can really speed up the process, even if you're still double checking.

Exactly. At first it means nothing. Over time they can begin to trust you.

If the project has a community forum or chat, be active and help answer questions. That takes a lot of pressure off the dev team. I did that for 4-5 years on the Handbrake project before family commitments ate up my free time.

I myself am a maintainer/main developer of a project and the people that help out in the group chat are a god sent. Takes a lot of pressure out of my day.

I'd love to help out on Open Source projects but have often just not really known where to start. I guess the challenge is to become a experienced enough user of a specific project first.

That one is maybe the easiest to do :

express your gratitude to the maintainers

Besides that there is the possibility to donate. And since the xz backdoor incident I would say it makes sense to keep an eye on end users trying to bully or overload developers. If I remember well I read that the developer of uMatrix stopped with that project because of annoying users filing bug reports with unfriendly and demanding discourse, which can be exhausting for a sole developer.

Yeah agree this is the easiest.. I would like to help carry the load somehow. Perhaps filtering /dealing with comments could be a start.

Sometimes an open source project is too niche for anyone to take notice. I myself am developing a networking reliability layer ported from C to modern C++ and I've yet to see a person use it except yours truly. Sad truth.