How to be a good open source community citizen

Commentary: Open source has never been more important, yet getting started with open source communities can feel daunting. Here are experts’ tips on how to get involved in open source.

Image: vladans, Getty Images/iStockphoto

Sure, virtually all software includes open source code, but that doesn’t mean you’re an expert in any particular open source project. More pertinently, it also doesn’t mean you necessarily know how to behave when you decide to show up and knock on the GitHub repository for a given project. Or, for that matter, what “someone new should know in order to start acting as a good open source community citizen,” as Tom “Spot” Callaway recently posted on Twitter. 

The responses to Spot’s question are varied and useful for anyone who hopes to participate in open source software communities.

SEE: Linux service control commands (TechRepublic Premium)

“I’m new here”

The first rule of open source

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by ASNF

Why SaaS vendors like Snowflake love open source

Commentary: For those who look at the success of SaaS services as portending bad things for open source, the opposite may be true.

Image: Ildo Frazao, Getty Images/iStockphoto

From the earliest days of MongoDB, co-founder Eliot Horowitz planned to build a managed database service. As he stressed in an interview, Horowitz knew that developers wouldn’t want to manage the database themselves if they could get someone to do it for them, provided they wouldn’t sacrifice safety and reliability in the process. The natural complement to open source, in other words, was cloud.

This isn’t to suggest cloud will kill open source. Though Redmonk analyst James Governor is correct to suggest that where developers are concerned, “Convenience is the killer app,” he’s also right to remind us that open source “is a great way to build software, build trust, and foster community,” factors that cloud services don’t necessarily deliver. Even

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by ASNF

How to plan your life during a pandemic

The covid-19 pandemic shocked the world and generated high levels of economic, political, and social uncertainty. And for many people, the virus compounded the growing sense of uncertainty they already felt in their lives as a result of automation, geopolitical tensions, and widening inequalities.

With the many sudden changes that covid-19 has brought, planning for the future can feel impossible. Even short-term decisions—What will we do this weekend? Should I send my kids to school?—now require us to process a broad set of data and considerations. Trying to envision life months or a couple of years down the road may seem futile or even foolish.

When faced with high degrees of uncertainty, we tend to worry about all that might happen, and often do so in an unstructured manner. This kind of worry can spur knee-jerk reactions and inhibit sound decision-making, which is especially problematic in the middle of a

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by ASNF

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