Who Of 5W1H - Who will participate in open source?

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Who has contributed to open source since it was invented? As ordinary programmers, how can we participate in open source projects?

Many people think that participation in open source is a difficult thing. It's a big misconception that you must contribute code to participate or contribute to an open-source project. An open-source project is a community. An open-source project is a community with various roles, including Contributor, Committer, Maintainer, and User. Most people's understanding of participation in open-source may be limited to the first two in a narrow sense. And the first response to this question may be that direct participation in development is participation in open source projects.

User

But, besides the most direct Contributor and Committer, other people can contribute to the project in various ways. For example, the ZenTao project management software users are involved in the open-source project as Users. Using, tagging, recommending, and even submitting bugs and providing feedback on using ZenTao are all a kind of participation and contribution to the open-source project.

For example, in the Linux kernel development, version 5.9 has 24,000 developers involved. That's right, and they are all open-source project participants.

Contributor

The code, documentation, and work of open source projects are created, tested, used, discussed, and optimized by project community members. These processes can be divided into tasks requiring different skills, levels of involvement, and technical expertise. So, if you want to get involved in an open-source project and become a real contributor, there are many activities to choose from. For example, you have issued a pull request for the project and merged it into the project, tested and reported or fixed bugs, written and updated software, written or updated documentation, translated, recommended the project to others, organized off-line events, etc.

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Committer

Committers usually accumulate through various contributions during the daily operation of the project and get nominated and approved by the core maintenance team of the project, and eventually become committers from general contributors and have higher privileges in the open-source project. They are the developers who have written access to the code repository. In general, Committers have code repository access to commit code directly and often have the right to review other people's code to decide whether they can merge commits. As a participant in an open-source project, being a Committer is an honour and an important reason to encourage continued participation and keep the community healthy. For example, becoming an Apache Committer may be a small dream of many open source project engineers.

Maintainers

Users who work on a project and contribute to its development are often the initiators or owners of the open-source project and can be a team. They have the highest decision-making power in the open-source project, deciding the project's function, strategy, and direction. The Apache Software Foundation's organizational structure manages each project by an independent PMC (Project Management Committee). PMC members nominate and elect new committers for the project. PMC members are also responsible for nominating and voting for new PMC members.

How to Participate in Open Source:

• Directly involved in the development of open-source projects
• Participating in the testing of open source projects
• Submitting bugs and fixing bugs for open source projects
• Developing plug-ins for open source projects
• Participating in the promotion of open source projects
• Participating in the translation of the documentation of open source projects

In addition to the above ways of developers participating as individuals, you can also participate in open source projects in commercial companies so that while contributing to open source, you can receive material compensation and not be in financial distress. Many commercial companies are the initiators or major participants of open source projects. For example, OpenHarmony is an open-source project incubated and operated by OpenAtom Foundation, and HUAWEI is the project's initiator. Then the people from HUAWEI who are involved in this open-source project are also the participants of the open-source project.

The term open source originated in the context of software development and was used to designate a specific method for creating computer programs. Today, however, "open source" can be understood as a broader set of values - the development principles of open communication, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented. The spirit of open source still exists in other areas, and the essence of open source is "I made a thing, let's use it!" Such a spirit of Geek, but also the desire to make the world a better place.

If you find it terrible, make it perfect.