Last time the main body of WHO was Who “invented” open source, this time the main body is changed to look at the invention of open source, Who has made contributions to open source? As ordinary programmers, how can we participate in open source projects?

Many people think that participation in open source is a very high threshold thing, only through the code contribution to be a participant or contributor to open source projects, in fact, this is a big misunderstanding. An open source project is a community with a variety of roles. The roles of an open source project are Contributor, Committer, Maintainer and User. Most people’s understanding of participation in open source may be limited to the first two narrow sense, and the first reaction to this question may also be directly involved in development, is to participate in open source projects.

User

In fact, there are a variety of ways that others can contribute to a project beyond the most direct Contributor and Committer. For example, the users of the project management software of Zen Dao participate in the open source project as users. The use, marking, recommendation and even submission of bugs and providing feedback of Zen Dao are all participation and contributions to the open source project.

For example, in the Linux kernel development, the 5.9 version has grown to 24,000 developers. Yes, they were all part of the open source project at the time.

Contributor

The code, documentation, and artifacts of open source projects are created, tested, used, discussed, and optimized by members of the project community. These processes can be broken down into tasks that require different skills, different levels of involvement, and different levels of technical expertise. So, if you want to get involved in open source projects and become a true contributor, there are a number of activities to choose from. For example, I sent a pull request for the project and merged it into the project, tested and reported or fixed bugs, wrote and updated software, wrote or updated documents, translated, recommended the project to others, organized offline activities, etc.

Committer

Committers are usually nominated and recognized by the core maintenance team of the project through various contributions accumulated during the daily operation of the project. Eventually, Committers become committers and have higher authority in open source projects. They are developers who have the write operation authority of the code repository. Committers usually have repository rights to commit code directly and usually have the right to Review other people’s code to determine whether a commit can be merged. As an open source participant, being a Committer is an honor and an important reason to encourage continued participation and keep the community healthy. Being an Apache Committer, for example, is probably a small dream of many open source project engineers.

Maintainer

Users who work on a project and contribute to the development of the project. Often the originator or owner of the open source project, or it can be a team. They have the highest decision-making authority on the open source project, determining the functionality, strategy, and direction of the project. In the Apache Software Foundation’s organizational system, each project is managed by an independent PMC (Project Management Committee). PMC members nominate and elect new committers for the project, and PMC members nominate and vote for new PMC members, etc. Ways to participate in open source

Participate directly in the development of open source projects, participate in the testing of open source projects, submit bugs and fix bugs, develop plug-ins for open source projects, participate in the promotion of open source projects, participate in the document translation of open source projects

In addition to the above ways for developers to participate as individuals, they can also participate in open source projects in commercial companies, so that while contributing to open source, they can also get material rewards without falling into financial difficulties. There are many commercial companies that are the initiators or major participants of open source projects. For example, the recently popular OpenHarmony open-source project, incubated and run by the OpenAtom Foundation, was initiated by Huawei. All the staff in Huawei participating in this open source project are also participants of the open source project.

The term open source originated in the context of software development to specify a particular method of creating computer programs. Today, however, “open source” can be understood as a broader set of values — open communication, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development principles. In other fields, the spirit of open source still exists. The spirit of open source is “I made something, let’s use it!” Such a Geek spirit, but also a desire to make the world a better place.

If you find it terrible, make it perfect.